Welcome to Brainstuff from house Stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, why is bamboo appearing in everything from flooring, defencing to furniture? All of a sudden, bamboo is appearing in everything from flooring to paneling. And there are even people riding around on bamboo bicycles now and they're not too distant future. It's possible to imagine bamboo replacing wood in a number
of furniture and fencing products as well. Bamboo's use is growing because bamboo has several advantages over traditional woods like pine and oak. The first advantage is the fact that bamboo grows fast. Bamboo is not a tree. It's actually a very very large type of grass with an extremely strong stem. This grass heritage means that bamboo does not have bark, and it doesn't have deadwood at the center of the trunk. It also grows more like a long,
straight column rather than being tapered like most trees. Like many other grasses, bamboo can grow incredibly quickly. Given the right soil and the right weather, Some varieties of bamboo can grow more than a foot in a single day. This speed means that it takes much less time to get a usable crop of bamboo than it does to get, say, a usable crop of pine trees. An acre of pine trees takes three or four decades to reach a usable size. Bamboo grows more densely and can be harvested many times
in that same span of time. This means that an acre of bamboo forest is far more productive than an acre of pine trees or oak trees. Another advantage of bamboo is its strength. Bamboo is surprisingly strong, and pound per pound, certain species are as strong as steel. Heat treating the bamboo stocks maximizes the strength. Bamboo is so strong that it's being used in place of steel to make bicycle frames. In some cases, you can buy bamboo bicycle frames pre made, or you can look on the
internet and find instructions for building your own. It may surprise you that these frames are not made of any kind of specially engineered bamboo composite material. It's just normal bamboo stocks that have been heat treated with a blowtorch to strengthen the fibers. Bamboo flooring is a composite. To understand bamboo flooring, think about a typical bamboo stock. It's a hollow cylinder and the walls of the cylinder are not very thick, the cylinder can be cut into long strips.
These strips will have a slight curve to them because they were cut from a cylinder, but if the cylinder is large, say three inches in diameter or greater, the curve is very minor. It's easily removed by running the strip through a planer that makes it square. So now you have a thin square strip of bamboo that looks a lot like the wood for making a yard stick. These strips are turned into flooring in very much the
same way that pine is turned into plywood. Strips are laid down in alternating layers, with a heat activated glue added between the layers. A heated press then compresses the layers and activates the glue to bind everything together. When the process is complete, you have a laminated bamboo panel that's incredibly strong and relatively light weight. It can then be cut into strips or squares to make either traditional
tongue and groove flooring or parquet flooring. Bamboo flooring that's made in this way has several advantages over traditional hardwood flooring. The lamination process makes it extremely strong and natural. Bamboo tends to resist dents better than hardwood floors do. Bamboo flooring tends to be less expensive because bamboo grows so much faster than oak or pine. Best of all for many people is the fact that bamboo feels greener than wood. When loggers clear cut of forest for the lumber leaves
a scar that lasts for many years. With a bamboo for us, the roots are still alive and they regenerate the bamboo stocks with surprising speed. That, plus the fact that bamboo can be harvested so often, means that it takes far less land to grow bamboo than to grow the same amount of wood. The only thing you need to keep in mind with bamboo flooring and other bamboo
products is the source. You want to purchase your flooring from a reputable manufacturer to ensure uniform quality, appearance, strength, debt resistance, and chemical composition. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The how stuff Us I Find app has arrived down at it Today on iTunes