From the Forest to Your Floor: How Bamboo Flooring Is Harvested and Manufactured

Bamboo is flooring choice of the environmentally conscious for its sustainability. It's also a very beautiful material that exhibits a unique grain pattern. The bamboo flooring we see in the stores have come a long way from the delicate-looking yet absolutely sturdy plants that were harvested in forests or plantations. The bamboo undergoes many steps in order to be the highly prized bamboo flooring installed in homes.

Harvesting - No harm to each bamboo stalk
The bamboo flooring which we see in homes today is a result of an organized set of steps. It all starts with the harvest of bamboo stalks either from wild or cultivated bamboo forests. The controlled harvesting of bamboo is one of the more ecologically-friendly ways of acquiring building materials because it has very little impact on the individual stalk which bamboo for flooring is harvested from. In fact, it will continue to grow after harvesting.

Creating Bamboo Flooring
The bamboo is then stripped of the green outer covering, often referred to as the "skin." The bamboo is then cut lengthwise into fillets and milled along the edges in order to produce flat strips. The resulting flat strips are kiln dried to remove moisture and boiled in water that has been treated with preservatives. This is an important step because with out the preservatives, there is always the risk that mildew and mold will grow in your bamboo flooring.

Bamboo strips - bound together for durable floors
After boiling the strips, they are now ready to be glued together to make a durable surface that can be used for flooring. There are two ways to glue the strips which produce the two types of bamboo flooring available in the market, but more on that later.

Compressing the glued strips serves as the final step in making bamboo flooring boards. This step ensures that the bamboo floor board will be durable and ready for shipping. The tongue and groove parts, which make bamboo flooring very easy to install, are also added during this time.

Horizontal and Vertical Bamboo Flooring
One of the ways in which bamboo flooring is classified is according to the way the strips are oriented when glued. We have two classifications, horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal bamboo flooring is known for showcasing the knuckles and nodes naturally occurring in bamboo. In this type of bamboo flooring, the bamboo fillets are bound with the broader surface facing upward. Vertical bamboo flooring, on the other hand, features decorative channels caused by the binding of the strips. The strips for vertical bamboo flooring are glued with the narrow edges facing up, thus resulting in the channel pattern.

Which type you choose is a matter of personal choice, and both produce unique decorative effects. The techniques employed in the manufacture of bamboo floors are efficient in that there is minimum wastage of materials, making it an ideal building material for the environmentally conscious.

Strand Woven Bamboo Flooring
This is yet another type of bamboo flooring - a testament to how very little bamboo is wasted - made from the strips that come off the edge of the bamboo fillets during the procedure done to flatten them. These strips are crushed, glued, and then pressed together to form bamboo flooring boards that are scratch, UV, and moisture resistant.