An environmental, economic and practical assessment of bambooas a building material for supporting structures

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Introduction
1.1. Sustainability as a selection criterion for building
materials
Building materials are commonly selected through
functional, technical and financial requirements. However,
with sustainability as a key issue in the last decades,
especially in western countries, the environmental load of
building materials has also become a more important criterion.
In the year 1990, Speth [1] and Ehrlich and Ehrlich
[2] introduced their relationship of sustainability with the
world population, average welfare rate and environmental
impact of welfare commodities, demonstrating the
need of achieving a factor 20 environmental improvement
by the year 2040. Many organisations and institutions
have adopted this target.


2. Research methodology
2.1. Selection of studied bamboo products
The study presented was restricted to culms of the
bamboo species Guadua angustifolia, produced during
the National Bamboo Project in Costa Rica, air-dried
there, and used in the Netherlands, thus including transport
from Costa Rica to the Netherlands. Due to communication
problems and lack of data, an Asian bamboo
species, Phyllostachus pubescens, could not be assessed.
The assessment of an industrial product application
of bamboo (i.e., a wall panel) and its comparison with
more common alternatives, also part of the study by
Lugt [11], are not presented in this paper, therefore we
refer to [20].


3. Results
3.1. Results of the environmental assessment
3.1.1. Environmental load during the life cycle
Fig. 10 presents the environmental load of the bamboo
culm, divided in the different stages of its life cycle.