Bamboo Fabric is Practical

Our bamboo viscose fabrics can look and drape like silk, but are more practical because you can machine wash them on the gentle cycle and dry them in the drier or on the clothesline. They somewhat resist wrinkling without the addition of resin finishes added to some polyester/cotton blend fabrics to give them those qualities.



On Bamboo Fabric and the Environment

Many of our customers order our fabrics for applications in place of cotton because of its absorbency and comfort against the skin. Cotton is one of the most intensely sprayed crops in the world, and cotton pesticides are the greatest crop contributor to volatile organic compounds in the environment. Cotton requires wide spacing to grow, allowing bare soil to oxidize in the sun, releasing carbon into the atmosphere, allowing rain to wash soil and chemicals into streams, thus decreasing soil fertility.

Cotton fabrics, including those made from organic cotton raw material and labeled "organic," commonly go through a series of finishing processes involving synthetic resins, amylase enzyme, Kier boiling, detergents and alkaline solutions, and that's not including bleaches and brighteners used to alter color and caustic soda used in mercerization.

Bamboo, on the other hand, takes in five times the volume of greenhouse gasses as an equivalent stand of timber trees and releases 35% more oxygen. It needs no replanting, pesticides or fertilizers, and its roots retain water in the watershed, sustaining riverbanks and reducing water pollution. The bamboo used to make most of the fabrics we currently stock is processed via a type of viscose process involving caustic soda, and then washed with water.