Cheap Bamboo Flooring
I have to admit, when I first heard about bamboo flooring I couldn’t understand how it could possibly be a good alternative to other floors and especially how it could be a cheap hardwood flooring product like it was promoted as. It just didn’t make any sense to me to take all these small round bamboo canes and lay them side by side to make a floor. Of course, the picture I had in my mind had nothing to do with the realities behind this new, cheap green flooring product that is sweeping the world.
Bamboor Flooring
Compare this to bamboo which can be harvested in as little as three years but is usually six to eight years old when it is used for flooring. This allows for a very short rotation period which means that more bamboo flooring can be manufactured from a given area.
Bamboo is actually of the grass family which also puts it into a much more “Green” building category. That is because when harvested the plant is not killed. With a tree, once the stalk is cut off at the stump the plant dies generally and it needs to be replanted for the next generation. With a grass, as any homeowner can tell you, when you cut off the top of the plant it just keeps growing from the root up. This is exactly what you see with a bamboo. The stalk is cut off and then a new one sprouts up from the roots and begins to grow. In fact, this works so well that someone who plants bamboo in their yard has a hard time getting rid of it when they change their landscaping again.
Bamboo Flooring Manufacturing
So back to how they produce bamboo flooring. Unlike my original thought, the stalks are not laid down next each other. Instead, the stalks are taken to a mill where they are stripped into small pieces. The bamboo is also boiled at this point in order to remove moisture and natural sugars. The strands are then mixed with a resin and laid out into a mat. This mat is pressed and heated which causes the resin to set up and with the structural strength from the bamboo fibers it creates a strong sheet like a sheet of plywood or oriented strand board.
This sheet is then cut into the desired flooring sizes. Depending on the thickness and make up of the sheet the flooring pieces can either be put together into a floating floor or they can actually be secured to the underlayment. An added advantage to using bamboo as an environmentally friendly flooring product is that event he scraps are used to create flooring panels. Thus you can choose from vertical grain, horizontal or flat grain, or an strand woven grain structure.
The main concern with this type of flooring is the resin material that is used. A big question is the use of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds. If you are considering a bamboo floor, or any type of laminate flooring system, then be sure to purchase from a reputable source and compare the VOC ratings. Flooring is now rated for air quality and this is definitely something to be aware of.
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