Bamboo-zled?

[August 15th, 2007]

This November, Mayor Tom Potter and Commissioner Dan Saltzman will head to Chicago for the annual Greenbuild conference. There, they’ll promote Portland as a center of eco-friendly business—and share a few all-natural, 100-percent Oregon cocktails (Medoyeff) with the titans of sustainable industry.

The city gave a $55,000 contract in July to a local firm, Marketshift Strategies, to organize the city’s promotion and brand Portland as a green-business center. The promotion, called PDX Lounge, debuted last year in Denver at Greenbuild, put on by the U.S. Green Building Council and attracting about 18,000 people.

Some 30 companies, from Columbia Forest Products to the Bike Gallery, have signed on so far to PDX Lounge. They’ll pay from $2,500 to $20,000 in cash or an in-kind contribution such as furniture or catering.

“We’re interested in companies with authenticity,” says Marketshift co-founder Stephanie Swanson, a former staffer in the city’s Office of Sustainable Development. “It isn’t just about marketing, it’s about demonstrating value.”

In this greenwashed age, however, what constitutes “authenticity” and “sustainability” is debatable. And at least one PDX Lounge partner, Bamboo Revolution, shows that the tenets of sustainability, such as localism and renewability, can sometimes conflict.

The Southeast Portland company, which will likely donate materials and labor for its PDX Lounge membership, imports flooring and other bamboo products from a mill near Shanghai, China.

“Bamboo is a grass. It grows quickly. That’s an advantage,” says Viviane Simon-Brown, coordinator of Oregon State University’s sustainable living project. “Where it gets complex is that the majority of bamboo of commercial quality grows in places that are a long ways away—so you’ve got this problem of getting it here using fossil fuels.”

“Here in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, we have native products that do basically the same thing. That is, wood products,” she says. “If you believe in sustainability and supporting your own local area, then going with local wood products seems like a smart move.”

Bamboo Revolution’s owner, Michael Pullen, is familiar with that argument, and with what he calls the “disinformation” that dogs anyone doing business in China. He defends his products’ green cred and is “extremely satisfied” with working conditions at his partner plant, Hangzhou Zen Bamboo and Hardwood Products Co. Ltd. Pullen visits several times a year.

He dropped a previous supplier, Ecomax, after it signed up with Home Depot and Lowe’s. Big clients often bring pressure to cut corners, he says.

But China’s recent bamboo boom, fueled in part by “green” marketing in the West such as PDX Lounge, has costs. Last December, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration warned that bamboo pulp-papermaking plants endangered forests and waterways. A 2005 report by Dovetail Partners, a sustainable forestry foundation partly funded by Boise-Cascade and Weyerhaeuser, said Chinese bamboo production often entailed deforestation, erosion and pesticide use.

“In China, much of the bamboo is coming out of agricultural fields. People say this isn’t damaging forests. What they don’t know is, five years ago that field was a forest, and was cleared specifically for the growing of bamboo,” says Jim Bowyer, the report’s author.

Bamboo is a LEED-certified green building product. But LEED doesn’t question how bamboo is harvested.

Pullen says “there’s no comparison” with bamboo, harvested largely by hand, and machine-intensive timber production. Before his last China trip, in May, he heard about the deforestation. “I did as much investigating as I could, and I didn’t hear of one case of that,” he says.

He says his bamboo is harvested from a natural forest in a government-controlled area, which, he says, is better regulated than a private plantation. What about the cost of shipping over the world’s largest ocean?

Pullen says most of his bamboo is grown within three hours of the mill, which is only two hours’ drive from Shanghai. Ocean freight, he argues, is more efficient than the continent-crossing road transport of timber.

“I don’t have the numbers,” Pullen says. “If I did, I’d put it on my website, because I’m pretty tired of hearing about it.”

Pullen knows more about his supply chain than many other bamboo dealers. The floor clerk at Home Depot, for instance, can’t tell you who made that rattan deck chair. But what due diligence did the city do before agreeing to promote the sustainability of its PDX Lounge partners?

Says Saltzman: “That’s a good question. I don’t think we have an answer to that.”

Jennifer Yocom, a city program specialist working on PDX Lounge: “That’s certainly part of the reason we’re doing what we’re doing, to clarify these questions.”

Marketshift’s Swanson: “All of this sparks conversation and debate and dialogue.”

Let the dialogue begin! And pass the Medoyeff.