Stronger Than Steel.(Business)(bamboo)

Byline: Lily Huang

Bamboo may be the world's greenest raw material. Architects and bicycle designers are catching on.

For the opening race of the Eastern U.S. collegiate cycling season, Nick Frey, a junior at Princeton, had a brand-new bike. Frey, currently the under-23 national time-trial champion and a recent hire of the Time Pro Cycling Team, had left his state-of-the-art, $13,000 carbon-fiber team bike at home. What he brought instead--and what was drawing a steady crowd of disbelieving collegiate cyclists on that chilly March morning--was an even more recent model: a racing bike he and friends had made out of bamboo.

Frey and pioneers beyond the bike world are discovering that bamboo may be the most useful raw material ever to be overlooked. Although a common building material in many tropical countries, it's considered "the poor man's timber," and in the West it's mainly decorative. As the world goes green, however, bamboo's essential qualities are beginning to win converts. Environmental organizations are promoting its use as a building material, architects are putting it into green homes, and makers of flooring, furniture and now bikes are quietly setting up their industries for a bamboo revolution.

Despite its lowly reputation, bamboo may be the strongest stuff on the planet. It has greater tensile strength (or resistance to being pulled apart) than steel, and it withstands compression better than concrete. Both qualities are essential to keeping the plant, which grows to nearly 60 meters but is only as wide at the base as the very top, from falling over. It needs the compression strength to hold up its own weight and tensile strength to bend in the wind without breaking. "Our concept of strength is, it doesn't move, it doesn't break," says Dan Smith, who owns Smith & Fong, the largest manufacturer of bamboo plywood in the United States. "The Chinese concept is, you've got to bend with things. If you don't bend, you break. Bamboo's strength is in its ability to bend, and that's the miracle."

The Western mind is also opening to bamboo's environmental qualities. In both temperate and tropical climates, it grows as quickly and abundantly as a weed. Though most often used as an alternative to timber, bamboo, with its underground rhizome root system that continually regenerates the plant when the stalks are cut, is technically a type of grass. In fact, it grows faster than any other grass--in some conditions well over a meter a ...