Why do companies based in paper products (toilet paper, paper towels, plates/bowls, etc) use trees for their products, instead of faster growing plants like bamboo or hemp?

Question

Using plants that grow quicker and use less water seems like a better business decision to me.

In: 211

Answer 1

Trees are easy to grow. And the kind of trees used for paper comes from wood farms. They quite literally don’t take much effort to grow other than about every 10 years you need to go and clear the inferior stock, which is what gets sold to make paper.

Now why ain’t bamboo used? Bamboo is a grass. To use it as a material, which is perfectly doable and is used in many places. You’d need to re-engineer the whole process. Turning wood in to cellulose is a complicated chemical process and a massive scale. These are the facilities that are in use at this moment.

Also hemp is a bad alternative, it requires farmland to grow. Harvesting is expensive and complicated. This farmland is more valuable to use to grow food for humans and animals.

Bamboo however, well you’d need the climate and environment to support it then start growing it. Nothing stopping you. However you are competing against vast tracks of land growing trees. Bamboo is only environmentally friendly when grown in an environment where it naturally grows and is not used to displace other things.

Now another important note is that a tree has WAY more biomass than bamboo. Bamboo is hollow, it is mainly empty space. A tree farm can produce bigger yield after long times and more variety of materials. The under 30 year old trees go to pulp and pellets depending on quality, over 30 years start to become good material for construction. Depending on the way you harvest, selectively over long period of time or clear cutting you can get different kind of value.

Now the companies making cellulose don’t particularly care about the quality or grade of wood, they care about the price of it. Companies making disposable paper don’t care at all about where the pulp comes from as long as it meets the specifications.

I personally belief bamboo is the future. Bamboo composites have exciting engineering properties. But bamboo is used mainly in places where it grows. It doesn’t grow in Europe or North-America particularly well. Shipping it from abroad is not worth the money. If you wanted to use bamboo you process it where it grows.

Now where bamboo grows, it is used a lot. However it doesn’t grow up north. It’s northernmost areas are the northern parts of Japan, which is barely at the level of mediterrian.