eli5: Why aren’t bamboo products like Toilet Paper/Paper towels considerably cheaper than their tree counterparts?
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Bamboo grows fast but each bamboo plant is also small and partly hollow. The total rate that wood is produced from bamboo vs something like a pine tree is not as different as you might expect.
Also, trees are ridiculously easy to grow in places like the US. You don’t need pesticides or irrigation or much labor to make them grow, and it’s efficient/fast to harvest them because each one is huge. Even if trees produce wood slower than bamboo, that’s ok, you just need more land to farm the amount of trees you want. Let one patch of land regrow while you harvest a different one, and in several years, you’ll have trees again in the first place.
Land suitable for growing trees is in ample supply in a place like the US. Because it’s so easy to harvest and regrow trees, you just need enough land to provide trees at the rate you want, and it’s very cost effective and easy.
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