Sustainable Building and Construction - International Environmental ...

Sustainable Building and Construction
In many developing countries there do already exist examples for the successful
utilisation and further development of renewable materials. This process offers them
beneath a sustainable development the additional chance for economic growth threw
the production and export of building materials. One successful example is the
utilisation of bamboo, which is a much promising material for further development of
sustainable building products, because it has many ecological benefits. It does grow
very fast in many regions and climates and is very strong. Therefore it produces much
more biomass in a specific time and place than timber.
Bamboo is utilised as a building material since thousands of years in almost any
countries of the world. Since several years it is also used to produce high quality
technical building products, like e.g. bamboo parquet for interior floors as well as
construction boards for walls and ceilings. In future it may be also used to produce
“bio-hight-tech” building materials, which could be comparable with plywood.
Examples in Columbia (e.g. by Velez, S. and Hidalgo, O., in Vegesack, A., Kries, M.
(editors); “Grow your own House”; Germany, Weil am Rhein, 2000) show that it is
possible to build out of bamboo big and challenging functional buildings and
representative residential buildings for the upper-class as well as cost-effective
residential building projects for low-income groups.
Illustration 28: Columbian Zero Emission
(Zeri) Bamboo Pavilion at the Expo 2000 in
Hanover (Architect: Velez, S.).
For the building industry, by 1995 in
Costa Rica 700 hectares of land
throughout the country have been planted
with a special kind of bamboo (Guadua
Angustifolia), suitable for building, and
traditionally used for the construction of
structural posts and beams in Columbia
and Ecuador. This should produce
enough material for 10.000 houses per
year. It was estimated that the same
number of houses built from forest
hardwood timber would have caused the
destruction of 6.000 hectares of
indigenous forest. “The area planted with
bamboo has increased to 350 hectares.
This amount of bamboo planted will
meet local demands for housing,
furniture and a limited quantity of
industrial projects. Currently, the
government plans to increase number of
hectares under cultivation. More than
3000 bamboo homes have been built
throughout Costa Rica and, at this time,
the Bamboo Foundation (FUNBAMBU,
a private, non-profit foundation and
operating since 1996 as auto-financed
business activity) is building around
1.500 housing units a year. This represents 6% of all homes built annually in Costa
Rica, a significant proportion, and also provides permanent employment to more than
30