GreenWood Premium Bamboo Flooring
Consumers appreciate bamboo products because of the design, elegance, unique grain and color. Our factories produce a wide variety of bamboo floor lengths, widths, colors and styles (engineered, hand scraped, and stained). Also available are veneer and panels, which provide unique design opportunities for architects and interior designers. This type of elegance, design and color is not found in most hardwood products. Bamboo is used for construction of decorative items and furniture for both residential and commercial use as well as unusual applications such as airport ceilings and sports floors.
Quality bamboo makes a beautiful, warm, environmentally friendly floor that can be enjoyed for many years. Since the manufacturing of bamboo flooring has so many variables, quality will vary from different manufacturers. Our manufacturers use quality materials to make an excellent product. We do not purchase our bamboo flooring because it's a "great buy"! That "great buy" can be very expensive if the bamboo fails in the future. The adage about getting what you pay for will be true with bamboo as with other items.
BAMBOO FLOORING COLORS
Bamboo flooring is typically available in two colors, natural and carbonized. The natural color is golden or blonde whereas the carbonized color has darker, coffee-colored tones. Other colors in bamboo flooring may be obtained by staining the unfinished product.
Bamboo flooring has two basic constructions; horizontal and vertical. Horizontal boards are manufactured by laminating three layers of bamboo strips together. This presents an appearance that has been compared to flattened bamboo stalks, with the unique nodal pattern characteristic of bamboo.
Turning the bamboo strips 90 degrees and positioning the strips next to each other produces the vertical construction. The strips are then pressed into a single layer. In effect, one walks on the edge of the strip. The horizontal construction, when properly assembled, is both harder and more dimensionally stable than the vertical construction.
An alternative to solid bamboo is engineered bamboo. This consists of a combination of 6 or 8 plies of wood (plywood) covered by a wear layer of bamboo. This assures maximum stability and easier installation. GreenWood offers a 48 3/8 x 3 3/4 x 3/8" and a 72 7/8 x 4 7/8 x 5/8" pre-finished engineered plank.
QUALITY BAMBOO FLOORING
Most bamboo flooring uses adhesives with a urea formaldehyde resin. Typical Chinese adhesive in lower priced flooring has a formaldehyde emission around 0.237ppm. GreenWood PREMIUM BambooTM flooring used adhesive that has only 0.0127ppm formaldehyde emission. This is better than most Indoor Air Quality recommendations. When required, GreenWood can also furnish formaldehyde-free bamboo for those applications that may requires this.
Unlike hardwood floors that come from slow growing trees, bamboo flooring is produced from an extremely fast growing grass. Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on Earth. In fact, bamboo grows one third faster than the fastest growing tree. Some bamboo species can grow 24 inches per day and, within 90 days, reach 60 to 90 feet in height. When harvested, the bamboo root system merely sprouts a new shoot the following rainy season; no re-planting is necessary. In addition, unlike traditional hardwoods that are harvested every 40 to 60 years, bamboo can be harvested every 4 to 8 years. Bamboo is also an important factor in controlling erosion. This added environmental benefit is due to the extensive root system that keeps the surrounding soil in place.
During the manufacturing process, almost 100 % of the bamboo is utilized. The material that is too small or weak for flooring production is used for many diverse products such as furniture, paper, chopsticks and toothpicks.
