A Seattle clothing startup, Five Bamboo, hopes to clean up the dirty process used to make bamboo fabrics and capitalize on the market for organic clothing, which is taking up a growing part of the $220 billion fiber market, with sales rising 55 percent to $360 million in 2008 from 2007.
Most bamboo fabrics are made by mashing the stalks into pulp, soaking the pulp, drying it and then soaking it again. The chemicals used in the baths are harmful to humans when handled incorrectly and can cause breathing problems and nerve damage.
The process Five Bamboo is helping to develop is similar except that the bamboo is soaked in an organic compound instead of harmful chemicals. In addition, 99 percent of the organic compounds can be recovered and reused when the process is complete.
Five Bamboo is run by five siblings with experience working in the niche clothing industry. In their family’s garage, they began making clothing for ultimate frisbee players in 2005, and have since expanded to office space in downtown Seattle.
Bamboo is popular with eco-designers because it is renewable and can grow quickly without the use of pesticides. “Pretty much every agricultural product on the market uses pesticides, including cotton, which uses 25 percent of the world’s pesticides. But bamboo uses none,” says Rohre Titcomb, Five Bamboo’s bamboo expert and one of the company’s five sibling owners. “Bamboo requires no fertilizer,” she adds, “and sustainable harvesting practices are not just political, they’re economical.”