People who think of bamboo as merely the stuff of kitschy island souvenirs or those brittle, cheap window shades are in for a surprise. Bamboo turns out to be the newest, most popular source of material for everything from T-shirts to table tops.

Bamboo became an alternative to hardwood for furniture and flooring in the mid-1990s. Since then it has worked its way into every room in the American household, and now even the clothes closet. Because it is fast-growing and durable, and considered by some to be cultivated in a more eco-friendly way than other raw materials, bamboo is being used to make everything from baby bassinets to sandals to caskets.

Target, the trend-setting retail chain, sells the kind of bamboo products you might expect, including serving trays and folding chairs. But bamboo also is woven into a new line of colorful bedding and pillows at Target. A set of queen-size purple bamboo sheets costs $49.99.

Smaller retailers are also beginning to offer bamboo fabrics. At IIKH, an eco-friendly boutique in Manhattan, the stock of bamboo kitchen products and bamboo furniture will soon be joined by bamboo T-shirts. The Wave Hound Surf Shop in Pipersville, Pa., offers colorful printed bamboo T-shirts as well as bamboo scarves and tank tops.
“Bamboo is just going to be huge,” said Rich Delano, president of Bamboo Textile in Brea, Calif., the company that imports the raw fiber for Target’s bamboo bedding. “Everyone freaked out about hemp,” he said, but the fiber never lived up to its all-purpose promise. “There needed to be a fiber that could go toe to toe with cotton or rayon.”
Delano said that since he first started to sell bamboo T-shirts in 2003, he has seen his business triple. He now offers bamboo sweaters, socks and shawls and is developing a line of bamboo jeans that is expected to reach the market in 2007.
“It’s known as the plant of a thousand uses,” said Gib Cooper, director of the Bamboo of the Americas organization, and the owner of Tradewinds Bamboo Nursery in Oregon. “Asia has developed its culture around bamboo for thousands of years. Our culture was lacking bamboo because it was not native. Now it’s an acceptable product in any home improvement store.”
When Cooper began to offer bamboo flooring through his catalog in 1995, none of the major home improvement stores carried it. Now it is used to make tables, chairs, dressers, kitchen cabinets and window frames, and bamboo flooring can be found in stores like Home Depot and Lowes, he said.

Bamboo is stronger than it looks, with a greater tensile strength than steel. That’s about the same hardness as the ash handle of an axe, according to Dave Flannagan, who is on the board of directors of the American Bamboo Society. As one of the fastest-growing woody plants, bamboo reaches a harvestable stage after only three years of growth, while harvesters have to wait about 20 years to cut a normal hardwood tree like northern white cedar.

The plant is native to the high latitudes of Asia, all the way south through the continent and beyond to northern Australia. Because it has been widely transported, however, it’s now cultivated throughout the world.

The majority of bamboo comes from China, although farmers in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama grow it commercially. Some American dealers get their bamboo from farms they own and operate in Central and South America.

Even so, at least for flooring, fences, furniture and the like, bamboo is still more expensive than conventional hardwoods like cherry or maple.
In part that’s because it’s difficult to harvest. Bamboo grows like blades of grass from thickly matted roots, so that a 4-year-old stalk can be right next to an immature 2-year-old stalk. It is also expensive to ship from China, where many bamboo products are mass-produced. “Right away it makes it more expensive than people want it to be,” Flannagan said.
However, using bamboo in fabrics is turning out to be just as affordable as using conventional fabrics, according to textile producers. The raw fiber of the bamboo stalk is broken down and spun into a yarn.

Bamboo makes a more earth-friendly textile than cotton, which often requires the use of heavy pesticides and a higher ratio of plants to completed fabric, Delano said.

Some green magazines like the “Green Guide”, which scopes out new earth-friendly products, criticize Target’s sheets for being only a 60/40 blend of 60 percent bamboo and 40 percent conventional cotton. But other environmentalists believe that the introduction of the eco-friendly material into a national chain store marks a breakthrough.

Mara Kloiber, the owner of IIKH, believes that as bamboo becomes more popular and bamboo clothes take off, it will continue to get cheaper. She notes that organic cotton bedding used to be a luxury-priced item, “but now you can get organic cotton high quality sheets and they will be cheaper than some of the name brands.”
“And with bamboo,” she said, “well, it’s such an incredibly flexible material.”