Can Bamboo Save the World?
Is bamboo a plant we should be using more in this country?
• All over Asia bamboo is used for scaffolding when people build multi story buildings. It is an amazing sight for those of use used to high embodied energy steel scaffolding. I have not seen the relative strengths and safety factors but there was a lot used on some very tall buildings.
• Have you seen and felt cloth made from bamboo? It is beautifully soft!
• Apparently bamboo also makes wonderful paper
Bamboo is a fast growing “grass” and wonderfully strong. If it is so good for all these uses should we be using it more?
However, here is a very exciting find by some Australian scientists in northern New South Wales. Leigh Sullivan, from Southern Cross University, explained the significance of the find to told The ABC’s 7.30 Report. “This is a really old growth of bamboo here and it’s been here at least 50 years according to the aerial photographs. So it’s been here a long time shedding leaves onto the ground and when you actually look at the accumulation of the organic matter what we can see is a really thick spongy layer full of organic matter in various states of decay with thick mulch material beneath it.”
Amongst the decay are thousands of tiny capsules of carbon known as plant stones, invisible to the naked eye and virtually indestructible. “Plant stone is just like a glass jar that has the carbon inside it and that gets deposited into the soil when the plant dies and, basically, it’s very stable, it’s there for thousands of years,” said Jeffrey Parr, also of Southern Cross University. “The carbon is actually enclosed by a silica coating. The silica coating protects it from being decomposed in soils.”
Apparently the “plant stones” from sugar cane are even plumper, and hold even more carbon.
Some plants make more plant stones than others and with the warming world now desperate to capture and store carbon, these scientists believe they’ve hit on something big. They were measuring the plant stones to carbon date some ancient soil when they suddenly realised the significance for global warming.
While sugar does not deposit as fast as bamboo, it’s still locking carbon into plant substance at a rapid rate. With sugar, for every tonne of carbon put into the atmosphere, 2.6 tonne are taken out. Apparently the key is choosing the right type of sugar cane.
While Australia’s emissions trading scheme, won’t initially include agriculture because of the difficulty measuring things like emissions from things like cattle burping and carbon capture from forests
Until now, people have only concentrated on forests for carbon capturer but tress seldom make plant stones and they give off carbon when they’re cut down. By contrast, plant stones made by crops and grasses are secured for thousands of years, and if the crop’s harvested and regrown, more new plant stones are created, and they’re easy to measure.
The problem with trees for carbon sequestration is that if you have a fire, a disease, or you want to change the forest back to a paddock, you lose the stored carbon. With plant stone carbon we can actually get the carbon in the crop and estimate it quite easily before it hits the soil.”
Interesting Perhaps we should be planting more bamboo.
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