Lately, I’ve been seeing bamboo-based paper towels, facial tissues, and other such products on store shelves.
The makers tout the environmental benefits of using “rapidly renewable bamboo” that “helps combat deforestation” among other claims.
But is cutting down bamboo to make paper towels, etc., any better than cutting down trees to do the same? And is it better than using recycled paper originally sourced from trees to make these products?
The box of facial tissues in front of me (the source of the quotes above) also states that the tissues were made in China. That also raises the issue of whether the energy and other environmental costs in transporting these products from China to the U.S. negates any other environment-saving benefits of bamboo, if indeed they exist.
All paper is made from fast-growing trees, which are farmed for the explicit purpose of making paper. You’re not chopping down old-growth forests to make paper, and you’re not replacing the trees you cut down with anything that would ever eventually become old-growth forest. Bamboo is just the epitome of fast-growing wood. You’d probably be able to use less land that way, which is mostly an economic decision, but I suppose would have environmental benefits, too.
On the other hand, while bamboo grows much more quickly than normal wood, it’s also a lot more water, and hence a lower proportion of cellulose, so it’ll take a larger amount of raw bamboo to make paper than raw wood. So the difference in land use probably isn’t very big. And it only makes sense to grow bamboo in places that are naturally very rainy, to supply all of that water.
This is not true at all. Yes there are many pulp plantations in the south but for the most part the forest products industry is a highly integrated industry that makes everything from wood veneer and sawlogs to chips for pulp. Sawlog value is usually twice that of pulp with veneer prices or other specialty products even higher. So in reality a tree is harvested and used to make the highest value product possible. The waste, both mill waste (sawdust, chips, slabs and edgings) and actual trees not suitable for sawlogs (bent, twisted…) are pushed down the line to become pulp.
US based Bamboo farms displace native habitat, and Chlorine dioxide is used in both processes. Being a grass and fast growing Bamboo uses up Nitrogen stores and also requires fertilization and is also pretty water intensive. Here in the Pacific North west there are other impacts from logging but there is little need for fertilization or irrigation.
It really depends on what is important in a location and to a particular world view.
It is an exaggeration to say all paper. High quality paper, like that used in fax machines (the old fashioned ones, not printers with an extra module) used high quality long fiber pulp that had to come from old growth trees. The farmed trees grow too fast to make high quality fiber.