Yes. There are multiple examples of houses which possess bamboo made bamboo elements older than 100 years. The key to achieve it is the combination of the chemical treatment used for immunisation and the design of the house. Good methods exist to do proper immunisation; and when it comes to design the key, in a nutshell, is to provide a good hat and good boots to the house: protect the bamboo from intense and direct contact with water and sun.
Moreover, in C Squared we are adding a third dimension of protection to ensure +100 year duration and it is Adaptive Facades. You can find the LivingSense in our e-Learning page. The LivingSense is an open source IoT device that connects sensors and actuators to control adaptive facades. Therefore when the house senses direct sunlight it can unfold a shade, sunscreen or solar panel to avoid direct sunlight on bamboo. Lightwise can be done with water: once water is sensed the facade can adapt and unfold a protective layer.
Yes. According to the Drawdown Report (2020), if by 2050 there are 207M Ha of Bamboo planted, 21.31 Gigatons of Carbon can be removed from the atmosphere and add US$4.35 Trillion profit to the global economy. Moreover, there are 364M Ha available for bamboo plantations, allowing further Carbon Removal and Economic Growth. C2 aims to make this opportunity real, storing Carbon at the Gigaton/year scale.
The Building Industry is responsible for about 40% of Greenhouse gases emissions. However, there are about 1 billion people still living in slums and improper housing around the world. Interestingly enough, this housing deficit highly overlaps with the regions where bamboo grows and has a huge restorative potential: tropical and subtropical belts of the World. This means that bamboo supply and the potential demand of bamboo for construction highly overlaps. The mixed effect of bamboo being a very fast growing plant (hence fast captor of Carbon) and the possibility to use it locally in the Built Environment, makes it a great Carbon Negative solution.
1) We capture carbon by crowd-farming bamboo;
2) We store carbon by building casas (bamboo houses);
3) We transform the World’s housing deficit into a Giga Carbon Warehouse;
4) Our team’s verb is: work at the speed and with the qualities of light.
From the structural point of view, bamboo, if used correctly, can support more compression than concrete and more tension than steel.
From the environmental point of view, 1 m3 of bamboo that substitutes concrete or steel saves the emission of more than 3 ton of CO2.
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