Bamboo Flooring has skyrocketed to prominence in recent years due to its beautiful appearance, durability, affordability, and particularly, its environmental sustainability.

Bamboo is a tree-like grass that predominately grows in the forests of China, India, Vietnam and Myanmar. While bamboo is technically a grass, it provides many of the same building products as  trees such as lumber, furniture, and flooring.

Strand Woven Bamboo Flooring is manufactured by shredding the bamboo culms, or stems, down to its elongated fibres, or “strands”. Strands are separated into two batches: one designated for carbonized bamboo flooring and the other designated for natural bamboo flooring. The carbonized bamboo flooring strands are steamed to a temperature where the natural sugars transform into the characteristic brown colour that you will see in the final product whereas the natural bamboo flooring strands are bathed in a boric acid solution that removes the sugars entirely from the strands to provide an oak colour.  The strands are then twisted and woven together, immersed with a binding agent and hot- pressed together to create a product more than twice as hard as Northern Red Oak Flooring. The strand woven bamboo is then milled into either tongue and groove flooring or click together flooring. The next process is to apply many coats of lacquer to provide a beautiful, protective layer that you will walk on in your home for many years to come.

The main environmental plus of Bamboo Flooring is its extremely fast growth cycles. Please keep in mind that Raincoast Floors Ltd. does not pretend to be scientists and that this is simply an attempt to clarify the benefits of a potentially beneficial alternative to standard hardwood floors.

The harvest cycle for bamboo is roughly 5 years, as opposed to a minimum 50 years for trees. This means that we get the same amount of product in a fraction of the time on the same amount of land. Theoretically, this means that less land is needed for human consumption and more land can be devoted to conservation: this is undeniably good for the environment.