Bamboo Flooring Pros and Cons

Bamboo Flooring Pros

• Bamboo can fully mature and harden in 3 – 5 years (but it grows to full length in 3 months)
• Bamboo strips can be glued horizontally, vertically and strand woven to give a variety of looks.
• Available in different colors.

Bamboo Flooring Cons

• Bamboo is not a hardwood, it’s a type of grass
• Bamboo takes 3 – 5 years to fully harden but yet it grows to full length in as little as 3 months, most bamboo is cut to soon giving you soft inferior material
• Bamboo comes from China who clear cuts the plant after 3 months so they can make more profit and the end result is softer bamboo that has not been allowed to harden
• The different colors are not achieved by using stains instead it’s done by heating the bamboo which the longer you heat bamboo the softer it gets
• Bamboo stalks are very thin so this requires manufacturers to glue many strips together to produce a material that is thick enough to be used as flooring as a result there is a high glue to material ratio
• The bamboo plant grows in China and the flooring is manufactured in China using toxic glues that create off-gassing that makes many people sick especially people with allergies, respiratory issues or compromised immune systems.
• China is well known for producing cheap inferior and often dangerous unhealthy products, and there is an increasing amount of home building products coming from China now if you have not heard about the Chinese Drywall disaster please do a Google search for “Chinese drywall” and ask yourself if you think your bamboo flooring will turn out better.
• As a result of inferior bamboo that is harvested to soon and glued with toxic Chinese adhesives the bamboo is highly prone to denting from shoes, furniture, kids, pets and dropping objects on the floor. As soon as you get indentations in the floor the finish becomes highly prone to flaking and peeling.
• Most bamboo flooring can’t be sanded and refinished contrary to what most distributors tell you when they are trying to sell you bamboo. Read my post here to see my test results of sanding a bamboo floor board.
• We did a test and tried sanding a couple boards, the fumes that were emitted from the boards were the worst thing I’ve ever smelled and I was wearing a strong dust mask and still coughing. I would hate to see what sanding an entire floor in your home would be like, the toxic fumes would permeate everything in your house and would be extremely unhealthy. Read my post here about refinishing bamboo to learn about health risks