BAMBOO is now being grown just outside Paarl as a pilot project for bigger things to come.
According to Daan van Leeuwen Boomkamp of Dutch Energy Solutions (DES), giant bamboo offers a great potential as a carbon source, but has some very positive spin-offs as well.
Being a grass and not a tree, the way of incorporating CO˛ from the atmosphere is much more efficient than of dicotyledonous species.
Rated as one of the fastest growing plants known to man, giant bamboo will definitely require lots of carbon dioxide when it starts to grow to its full potential.
Besides the well known uses of bamboo as building material, paper and/or food product, there are lesser known products developed from this crop as textile and laminated flooring and very recent; bio-fuel.
As one of the founders of DES, van Leeuwen Boomkamp is strongly opposed to using food crops, like maize, as bio-fuel source material, especially on a continent where food is still in short supply to a vast amount of people.
He firmly believes that planting bamboo on a commercial scale will be a sustainable improvement for rural communities in Africa.
“In the light of being a highly successful carbon source to fight the excessive amounts of CO˛ in our atmosphere, this crop has got such a lot of good characteristics that it should become the crop of choice for the large scale developments by the carbon investment groups.
“The year round harvest of the product, after the fifth year of cultivation, is definitely a positive feature of this crop, thus generating a constant source of income for the community involved.
“However, the main problem, and the reason that bamboo is often overlooked in any development, is the production of plant material.”
Currently research is being done at Alba laboratories by Michiel van Asch in Atlantis to develop a system to propagate this crop on a large scale by cultivating plant material in a so-called plant tissue culture laboratory. When the system has been developed to become commercially viable, there will be no stopping this product!
To gain practical insight in the cultivation of this crop, van Leeuwen Boomkamp has planted a small commercial plot of a half hectare on his guest farm just outside Paarl. For more information www.biomass1.eu.
