Whenever someone tells me they want to plant bamboo, I ask the same question: what are you going to make with it?
It sounds simple, but it decides whether a plantation becomes a business or an expensive hobby. Without a buyer at the end of the chain, it’s hard to justify tearing out your trees or crops to make room for bamboo. And while you can make thousands of things from bamboo, you shouldn’t try. Pick one, two, or three products, and do them well.
That question was the starting point for the first webinar in our new series with the European Bamboo Foundation, recorded on September 25, 2026. The topic was engineered bamboo and value addition, and I was joined by four people who have each tried to answer it in a different corner of the world:
- Herwig van Geenhoven, Amabanda Bamboo, Uganda
- Mark Sebastian, Numat Bamboo, Philippines
- Juan Pablo Martinez, Wubu Bamboo, Guatemala
- Jasper Niens, artist, designer, and builder, Netherlands and Philippines
The full recording is on YouTube: Webinar #1: Engineered Bamboo and Value Addition. If you don’t have an hour and a half to spare, here’s what stood out.
In brief: Where can engineered bamboo actually win?
The conversation wandered across three continents, but a few themes kept coming back:
- Don’t compete head-on with Chinese engineered bamboo. Find a niche where China isn’t already dominant.
- Fiber and composites may be the most promising new market, replacing glass fiber and carbon fiber.
- Use the entire pole, and make products that complement each other.
- Know your species before you buy your machines.
- Building codes and government policy can make or break the industry.
- Start with the buyer and work backwards.
Don’t fight China on China’s turf
My standing advice to producers is not to compete with Chinese bamboo products head-on, and the panel backed that up from three different angles.
Mark pointed to government support. In his view, Chinese manufacturers can sell at break-even, or even at a loss, because the state backs exporters, and no startup can match that. Herwig added the practical side: China has endless stretches of straight, uniform moso poles, plus the skilled mechanics, electricians, and welders that automated production lines depend on. Those are hard to find in Uganda. Juan Pablo described a government-backed processing plant in Guatemala built to make Chinese-style boards. By his account, its costs run about eight times higher, and it’s working with asper and guadua, which behave very differently from moso in the machines.
The more interesting question came from the chat: won’t China simply follow anyone who finds a profitable niche? Herwig says Bamboo Uganda’s social media presence has already drawn Chinese visits and invitations, and his team is still deciding whether that’s an opportunity or a threat. Mark has been approached by a Chinese engineered bamboo manufacturer about building a factory in Malaysia. His read is that Chinese makers have hit an innovation ceiling, and that the smarter question isn’t “compete or avoid?” but “can we co-process?” China brings manufacturing prowess, while creative designers and new markets can come from elsewhere.
Fiber and composites: A different game
Herwig gave the most concrete example of playing a different game. His team harvests and cuts bamboo into slats and chips, and sells them to a company in the Netherlands that breaks them down into fibers between 5 mm and 250 mm. Composite makers then mix those fibers into resins to produce materials that compete with glass fiber and carbon fiber: motorcycle helmets, car dashboards, hoods, skis, even sailing yachts. He says the bio-based content of the resins is approaching 90 percent.
He also floated drones, since bamboo’s high strength-to-weight ratio is a real selling point, though he joked that the Chinese will mass-produce them as soon as they notice. The catch is that this is a young industry with secret recipes and plenty of IP, and an entire vertical chain has to change over before bamboo fiber goes mainstream.
Use the whole pole
Herwig offered one rule for anyone starting a bamboo business: whatever you make, use the entire pole. The thick base can become laminated strips. The middle section works for scaffolding or chips. And the thin top can go into biochar. Nothing is wasted, and he says the biochar gives his operation a negative carbon footprint. Mark said full pole utilization was one of the hardest challenges his own company faced.
Know your species before you buy your machines
Juan Pablo has spent 18 years in bamboo, after a career in the jewelry business, and his warning was blunt: the worst thing that can happen at the start is having money, because you’ll buy machinery that doesn’t suit your bamboo. Tooling, blade sharpness, and the hardness of the outer wall all matter. He built his own preservation system, adapted woodworking tools, and helped set up a furniture workshop in Ghana in one month for under $5,000. In the same country, he saw a factory with Taiwanese machinery that had been idle for 15 years. On paper, Ghana has around 200,000 hectares of bamboo. In practice, it’s scattered, crooked Bambusa vulgaris, and the machines were built for straight poles.
Herwig’s Dendrocalamus asper is “bone hard,” so his team modified their Taiwanese machines with local welders. Out of ten poles, only two or three are straight enough for the lamination line. The rest are sold as poles.
Mark pushed the point further with a provocative claim: Asper is too good for its own good. Strength isn’t what the market is asking for, he argued, and bamboo should compete on aesthetics and sustainability. His advice was to be species-agnostic, with a product for every species, rather than betting everything on one.
Codes and policy: The real bottleneck
Jasper’s goal is to build bigger-span buildings with laminated or strand-woven bamboo, turnkey and exportable to European architects. What’s stopping him is that building codes don’t recognize bamboo. Engineered bamboo has to meet engineered timber rules, which makes the beams far bulkier than they need to be. He thinks this is a five-to-ten-year problem, and that once the codes change, the door opens to every bamboo-growing country. He’s also working toward a pavilion in Rotterdam built with engineered bamboo.
Juan Pablo showed what that work looks like on the ground. In Guatemala, a handful of industry people formed a bamboo committee with the government and are now drafting national standards, drawing on ISO and on Colombian, Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Costa Rican norms. One standard is approved, a second is written, and a third, on laboratory testing of local bamboo, is next. He expects it to take years.
Policy can also work against you. Juan Pablo described a Colombian colleague who switched to importing Chinese bamboo because harvest and transport restrictions made local guadua impractical, despite an estimated 60,000 hectares standing in the country.
Start with the buyer, and work backwards
A question from the chat brought up Bamcore, the modular building company that has since closed. Mark and Juan Pablo both had dealings with them, and their takeaways were instructive. Juan Pablo said asper boards were strong enough for seven-story buildings when the company only needed three, and that engineered bamboo tends to cost $900 to $1,100 per cubic meter, well above the $550 to $600 they were aiming for. Mark’s lesson was to focus on the commercialization and work backwards. Know who will buy your product and at what price. Don’t idealize bamboo. And be prepared to control your own supply chain, because he says a ready-made one doesn’t exist. He added that of the three or four engineered bamboo manufacturers in the Philippines, two have pivoted away and one has closed.
Jasper offered the plantation side of the same problem. In Mindanao, banana growers hit by disease are switching to bamboo, and they already have the roads, trucks, and ports. The question they keep asking him is: we have lots of bamboo, now where do we go with it?
What about European bamboo?
A participant asked what Europe can do with its own, smaller-diameter bamboo. Herwig’s answer was that laminated construction products will always be handicapped by size, so Europe should look at the chemistry: cellulose and lignin as building blocks for bioplastics and biochemicals, the same direction university research is already taking with wood. Mark noted that this is where China is heading too. Juan Pablo added a caution: resin-heavy products like scrimber and strand-woven bamboo are designed to last 10 to 15 years outdoors, which means the offcuts won’t compost.
A follow-up question about which stage of the plant’s chemistry is best suited to which application went unanswered. If you know the answer, I’d love to hear from you.
Practical takeaways for bamboo growers and manufacturers
In my closing remarks, I boiled the discussion down to five points:
- Government policy matters. Subsidies and building codes can make or break an industry.
- Innovation beats imitation. The opening is in products that China isn’t already making.
- Composites are worth watching. Bamboo fiber is a promising and still young market.
- Be species-agnostic. Build your business around the bamboo you actually have.
- Use the whole pole. Every waste stream is a product waiting for a buyer.
We also heard from listeners in South Sudan, India, and elsewhere who are looking for partners and investment, which tells me there’s real appetite for more of these conversations. Bamboo is a remarkable plant, but remarkable plants don’t write their own business plans.
Watch the full webinar: Engineered Bamboo and Value Addition
Fuel for thought
To learn more about the bamboo industry, take a look around our website. You might find some of these articles especially interesting.
