My sister Kay, the “bamboo queen,” has a fascination for bamboo. She recently built the first bamboo museum in Antipolo, housing the first mini bamboo organ made in the Philippines, sourced from her own bamboo, and patterned after the famous Las Piñas bamboo organ. Ate Kay takes pride in playing the mini bamboo organ herself. The bamboo museum is inside a building with many bamboo items on display, such as furniture, cooking utensils, bags, cloth, towels, etc. Outside the garden is the amazing living bamboo museum with almost 50 varieties of bamboo, such as giant bamboo, yellow bamboo, black bamboo, iron bamboo, kawayan tinik, etc. In addition to its many uses, bamboo is edible. The late PNB Director Washington Sycip encouraged me to plant bamboo for food. Kawayan Tinik is the most common; Machiku shoots taste sweet, while the giant bamboo shoots are so big they can feed a barangay.
Have you heard about the innovation happening in Mindanao to propel Philippine bamboo forward as a leading building material and livelihood generator? You may be surprised to learn about the entrepreneurs collaborating to build a bamboo value chain based on our kawayan heritage grasses.
Some say Philippine bamboo is the best in the world. I recently had the opportunity to speak with former Secretary of Agriculture Cito Lorenzo and Mr. Bobby Castillo, Chairman of Rizome Philippines, about how our world-class bamboo is sparking our Filipino spirit of innovation. Incidentally, Secretary Cito’s office with bamboo doors is quite impressive indeed.
Rizome is making engineered bamboo a mainstream construction material at its flagship Cagayan de Oro City manufacturing center. Rizome has treatment processes that transform bamboo into durable, bug-resistant fibers laminated into engineered bamboo building materials at its facility, sourced from across Mindanao. The company provides builders with sustainable lumber and panel products that have the performance of steel and concrete, plus the beauty of hardwood trees. It is leading the use of bamboo for various construction applications, from floors and doors through architectural panels and, importantly, as glue-laminated beams, rafters, trusses, and even columns. Engineered bamboo products help accelerate the construction industry’s transition to carbon-neutral buildings.
The Philippine bamboo industry is emerging as a global supplier of building materials and a source of sustainable fibers for other important sectors of the green economy, including green paper & packaging, biomass energy, biofuels, biochar, and nutritional products. To meet the demand for bamboo in these sectors, Rizome is growing bamboo as a livelihood product through its community-based growing programs. In the Philippines, Rizome has proven its bamboo growing system through active, long-term agreements with Indigenous Communities in Mindanao and soon in other parts of the country. The Rizome community growing system provides funding for growing and maintaining bamboo as an agroforestry product coupled with a commercial off-take agreement to purchase the bamboo from the community as it matures. Since bamboo poles need to be regularly pruned, which rapidly regrow after each cutting, a community-based growing system will provide a continuous livelihood for the communities for generations to come.
As bamboo grows, carbon is removed from the atmosphere as bamboo grows and converted into bamboo poles. Bamboo grows 10 times faster than trees and is one of the fastest carbon natural removal systems on Earth. This carbon removal impact is amplified since the bamboo poles are rapidly regrown by the plant after being pruned for use as building materials. Thus, bamboo poles regularly cut by the community will remove more and more carbon for its 100-year lifetime. This natural, continuous carbon removal system is an ideal solution to help the world address the climate crisis today and over the long term as the world moves to carbon neutrality.
Secretary Cito and Mr. Castillo expanded my understanding that our Filipino bamboo is actually a base for building a world-class industry that is growing here at home and around the world. Bamboo is now being transformed into a new agroforestry industry in the Philippines. Let’s start planting bamboo!
Ms. Tarriela is PNB Board Adviser, Independent Director of LTG and Nickel Asia. She was formerly chairman of PNB, the first Filipina Vice President of Citibank N.A, and former Undersecretary of Finance. An environmentalist, she founded Flor’s Garden in Antipolo.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FINEX.