This autumn when I visited the Maison & Objet fair in Paris and I also visited the famous lifestyle shop Merci in Paris. It is a lovely 3-floor shop with everything from home decor, clothes, accessories etc. All products are not sustainable or made of recycled material but the shop is definitive worth visiting for getting inspired and in a good mood!
I spotted some really nice kitchen ware that could totally substitute the plastic kitchenware. Since I was not familiar with bamboo fibre I looked it up “Bamboo fibre is a cellulose fibre extracted or fabricated from natural bamboo (and possibly other additives) and is made from (or in the case of material fabrication, is) the pulp of bamboo plants. It is usually not made from the fibres of the plant, but is a synthetic viscose made from bamboo cellulose.” source www.wikipedia.org
In general, it seems like bamboo has gained popularity as a “green” fibre and more and more interior design / decoration brands are including bamboo fibre products in their collection.
Bamboo is very good environmentally-speaking in the production process: it’s a grass and grows quickly, so no need for worries related to the disappearance of rain forests which take ages to recover. It may not be totally uncontroversal when it comes to its environmental performance at the production stage, i.e. turning bamboo into products, but overall most people seem to agree that bamboo is a good material to use.
Summarizing, I do think the overall outcome is better using bamboo fibre since it is 100% biodegradable so I highly encourage you swopping plastic articles to bamboo fibre ones. Oh, and by the way, “biodegradable” seems to be popping up everywhere these days, we’ll be sure to cover some more on that topic in the near future as we think this might be one of the major trends in eco-land for 2012…
Mikaela Ekholm
