Question: Are bamboo houses comercially viable on a large scale?

Natasha Watson answered on 20 Mar 2013:

Usually producing something on a large scale makes it commercially viable as you get the economies of scale, and bamboo is no different.

There are many different ways of making bamboo houses; you could use bamboo that has simply been cut down and then lashed together to form a structure; you could use timber for the structure and then use bamboo to form the walls and floors etc; or you could use laminated bamboo. Laminated bamboo is where the bamboo is cut into very thin layers and then glued together and squished to make rectangular beams. Imagine the pages of a book are the thin layers of bamboo; if you were to then glue them all together you’d get something very solid and rectangular. Lamboo is a US company that makes bamboo laminates; here is their brochure http://www.lamboo.us/Structure%20Landscape%20brochure%207-17-12.pdf

In all of these cases, you’d need a lot of bamboo for large scale development. Large managed bamboo forests are more efficient than smaller ones as their overheards to volume output would be lesser.

In the case of the laminated bamboo, the larger scale production of the beams will have economies of scale as the factory producing them will be able to work at optimum capacity.

I remember learning about economies of scale for Business Studies AS so if you’re interested maybe you could talk to one of your teachers? On the otherhand you could just wiki it!

Hope this answers your question!