Imagine standing on your bamboo flooring, chopping bamboo shoots on your bamboo cutting board. Give your hands a quick rinse with bamboo soap, dry them with your bamboo hand towel, and call in the bambinos who are playing with their new bamboo skateboards.
With the East’s fastest growing plant quickly sprouting up in homes all over the West, this scenario’s not too far from reality. The latest bamboo craze? The smooth and silky fabric that has environmentalists, clothing designers and fashionistas utterly bamboozled.
Bamboo’s eco-footprint is smaller than a size 5 stiletto. The highly renewable grass, praised for it’s rapid, several-feet-a-day growth, can be harvested in as little as three years. While bamboo, like hemp, is not yet certified organic, it possesses a natural ability to ward off plant munching pests without the use of toxic pesticides. Once purchased, a well-made bamboo garment will last years in your wardrobe, requires less laundering than other fabrics, and is 100 percent biodegradable.
Not only is bamboo easy on the earth, it’s easy on the… nose? Morris Saintsing of Bamboosa, a company that makes well-cut basics out of the eco-fabric, explained part of the allure for his customers is bamboo’s antimicrobial properties: “You can’t make it stink,” he swears. And believe him, it’s not for lack of trying. “I wore one shirt for seven days in the summer while fishing. I looked like I’d rolled in the mud, but the shirt smelled like it was just out of the dryer.”
The lanky plant wears equally well rolling in the mud or strutting the runway. Loyale Clothing, a New York City based eco-fashion label, added bamboo textiles to this year’s spring collection. Designer Jenny Hwa is thrilled with the wonder grass. “It has added a level of sophistication to our styles. With bamboo, the luster and drape of the fabric take our dresses and tops to a new level of elegance.”
So how do we go from shoots and leaves to a cute spring frock? Unlike cotton fiber, most bamboo textiles on the market are chemically processed, human-made fibers that are spun into yarn. According to Saintsing, the bamboo is chopped and crushed, and a chemical solvent (either Sodium Hydroxide and Carbon Disulfide, or N-Methylmorpholine-N-Oxide) liquefies the bamboo into a paste. This paste is turned into fibers about 1.5 inches long, which are spun into a yarn. The chemical processing makes bamboo fabric less of an earth angel than the cultivation of the plant. Luckily, modernized facilities provide a closed loop system for these chemicals — they are recycled back into the fiber-making process with little byproduct entering the waste stream.
Summer Bowen lives in Santa Monica where she runs her online eco-boutique, BTC Elements. She blogs about living and working green at www.btcelements.com/blog.