European Bamboo Research Project

Who: ArtEZ University

When: March 2022 - 2024

Our first collaborative research project is currently underway, starting in March 2022. Bamboo is a promising renewable raw material which grows quickly, absorbs large amounts of CO2 and contains useful chemical and mechanical properties. Up until now, it has been imported exclusively from Asia - in the near future we will have large-scale bamboo plantations in Europe. This opens up the gate for exploration into the possibilities for a sustainable bamboo supply chain. This new bamboo grown in Europe has a slightly different composition than the Asian variety, which means that more research is needed and much about the bamboo’s properties is still unclear. So, is it possible to transform the entire supply chain into something sustainable and transparent every step of the way – from cultivation and processing raw material to the semi-finished product and design, all the way up to furniture?

The lectureship and research group from the ArtEZ Tactical Design department is investigating everything that a sustainable bamboo supply chain would involve. They are collaborating with the bamboo various organizations and companies involved in growing, fibre processing, wood preservation and furniture production, and designers, students and teachers at ArtEZ from several disciplinary backgrounds.

About the project

Starting point

The first step to understand the scope of the project was to learn what shaped what the current state of European bamboo supply chain is, and to find out how we could make improvements by growing locally.

Support from local communities

Location, scale, and accessibility was absolutely crucial to this project. We want to make the biggest but most realistic impact to the European bamboo supply chain.

End goal

Contextualizing the needs of increasing local sources of European bamboo and understanding innovative design use cases to construct a European bamboo supply chain for our brightest and most creative minds.