Bamboo fabric – how eco.. .??

I’ve talked to a number of vendors and textile designers about bamboo fabric. All of the textile designers have raised concerns over the types of chemicals needed to process the tough bamboo wood into a soft fiber. The process may be similar to rayon processing (rayon is made from wood cellulouse); a caustic and chemical intensive process. National Geographic’s Green Guide has a new post today, about making bamboo fabric.

Not only are bamboo’s growing methods questioned, but so is the process of turning the stalk into fiber for fabrics and clothing. According to Morris Saintsing, sales development and operations partner of bamboo clothing retailer Bamboosa, all bamboo stalk intended for clothing in the United States is converted into raw fiber at one factory in China. “This is a proprietary process and they have a patent on it,” says Saintsing. “It’s hard to find out what is going on from an R&D standpoint,” he adds. Other sources have compared it to the viscose process used on rayon, which involves sodium hydroxide and carbon disulfide, both of which are caustic, and carbon disulfide has been known to cause breathing and sleeping problems among workers. Sodium hydroxide can threaten aquatic wildlife when released into groundwater and streams.Saintsing said that greener ways of creating bamboo fabrics are being tested, but those generally result in a linen-like product that doesn’t have the silky texture people are looking for in clothing. Few of the alternatives are in use, but “We’re doing what we can to make it a greener process,” he says.

Very interesting! About 10 years ago, I asked members of the Bamboo Society about bamboo paper. (Bamboo is a common fiber for papermaking in China — especially for prayer paper.)

They kindly put me in touch with a professor who had just returned from China. He told me the bamboo paper mill he visited was a chemical nightmare.

Bamboo for flooring and other wood uses, requires much less processes, so the ecological advantages of bamboo, seems to stand.