UPSCALING THE BAMBOO INDUSTRY Felix Böck
Bamboo has the potential to be perceived as an innovative material of the future, rather than just another short-term trend. The modernization and upscaling of the production technology, or combinations of this outstanding grass with commercially known timber species for hybrid products, are currently changing the public perception and offer a potential for economic growth in many developing countries that have bamboo as a natural resource. The example of timber, described by Nikita Aigner and Philipp Müller in their contribution (see p. 32), demonstrates that the technical processing and the invention of specific machinery is an important and necessary step for the emergence of an industrialized product. While norms and standards can be employed to guarantee the material properties of large productions, new industrial processes with a new generation of machinery are needed to lay the foundations. 72
There has been a recent and increasing interest in the development of bamboo-based industrially manufactured goods, known as Structural Bamboo Products (SBP). Over the last decade, recognized institutions worldwide started to systematically review, investigate, and promote these engineered bamboo products.1 In this process, the technologies and know-how from engineered wood products have been adapted to provide a varied range of materials that use bamboo for a growing list of structural, functional, and design applications. Most of these bamboo products originate from Asia and are known as Strand Woven Bamboo (SWB), featuring densities over 1.0 kilogram per cubic centimetre. They are used in applications where otherwise plywood, Oriented Strand Board (OSB), Oriented Strand Lumber (OSL), and other glue-laminated composite wood products are employed2 –
▲ Large-scale bamboo manufacturing facility in South-East Asia.