Environmental Use of Bamboo
Bamboo is a peerless erosion control agent. It has an extensive subterranean system of rhizomes and roots. For example, the rhizomes of Phyllostachys bambusoides are reported to travel about 3.6 m per year. A bamboo plant typically binds 6 m3 of soil. This wide-spreading root system create an effective mechanism for watershed protection, stitching the soil together along fragile riverbanks, deforested areas, and in places prone to mud slides.
"The Bamboo Forest is an ecological wastewater utilization system that essentially grows away, waste, producing a marketable crop in the process. Comprised of a subsurface evaporation-transpiration bed planted with bamboo and other rapid-growing, non-invasive plants, the system is engineered to provide an aerobic rhizosphere (the home of living organisms in the root system), in which damaging polluting components are transformed into plant nutrients" Discover magazine article elaborated on Bamboo used to treat waste water!
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