Buying eco friendly Bamboo gifts for the home

Posted on 08/09/2008

When you buy somebody an eco friendly gift for their home it’s nice to know you’re making a difference. We generally think of wooden products as being eco friendly as wood grows naturally and can be re-used and recycled relatively easily. There are now sustainable forests so we don’t have to lose trees needlessly just to satisfy our demand; but trees take tens or hundreds of years to grow.

Now bamboo is becoming increasingly popular – and with good reason. Bamboo is the fastest growing woody plant in the world, with growth rates of up to 4 feet a day in the right location and climate. Yes, four feet in one day.

Bamboo is a very hard, durable and lightweight wood

When harvested for wood, there are different qualities of bamboo, with mature stems being far superior to first-year stems. Young stems appear fully grown, but as they’re not fully developed are not as strong as mature stems. Ideally, bamboo should be harvested when it is mature (several years old) when, if treated it forms a very hard wood which is lightweight and durable. Mature bamboo is an excellent building material.

You can be sure that gifts made of bamboo are coming from a very sustainable source. There are many bamboo gifts now appearing for the home that were traditionally made from hard woods such as oak. Even grown in sustainable forests, Oak takes infinitely longer to mature than bamboo, which makes bamboo a very attractive choice when choosing any gift, not just an eco friendly gift.

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