For sustainable fashion brands, Bamboo has become a quintessential fabric to please woke customers. It all started in 2017 when the first bamboo-based clothing started to appear in the market. At that time, everyone was hooked to it; whenever fashion enthusiasts hurried up for brainstorming ideas, the use of bamboo fabric in clothing was one of the topics that made everyone think outside the box.
Fast forward to 2025, it has become pretty hard to justify the sustainability aspect of bamboo fabric, but are things really that bad? Well, with this blog, we are going to take a deep dive into finding out how bamboo clothing is sustainable, what its benefits are, and how its production does not hamper nature.
What Do We Know About Bamboo?
Let’s start with the very basic question: what do we know about bamboo? Well, for starters, it is a super plant; if, in the next Avengers movie, they cast someone as Bamboo Man, we would not be surprised at all.
Bamboo is known to be one of the most renewable sources for obtaining fabric for clothing. The plant can quickly grow up to 4 feet in height in a single day, making it the fastest-growing wood plant in the world. In addition to this, our beloved Panda’s Kryptonite absorbs around 33% more carbon-dioxide and produces 35% more oxygen in comparison to other plants that fall in the same category.
Now, one more interesting thing that makes bamboo the king of plants is that they require little water and no pesticides to thrive in raw nature. When bamboo is harvested from its plant, it quickly regenerates, just like Wolverine. All of this makes bamboo stand at the top of the sustainability ladder, making it a preferred choice for the creation of clothing fabric in the blink of an eye.
Different Types of Bamboo Fabric?
It may come as a surprise, but the bamboo fabric has different levels of purity; let us explain how:
1. Ryon
Ryon is a semi-synthetic fiber made from regenerated cellulose fibers. The fibers are naturally available, but during production, they have to be broken down into pieces, which results in the use of chemicals.
2. Viscose
This is a regenerated cellulose fiber that comes from plants, where the green shoots are first harvested and then cut into chunks of raw bamboo. Once this is done, chips that are produced from the harvesting are soaked in solution in order for them to get softer.
3. Lyocell Bamboo
The production of Lyocell bamboo fabric is somewhat similar to what we have explained in Viscose. The difference starts from manufacturing; the cellulose itself does not change its chemical composition. As a result, you may find lots of sustainable fashion brands use lyocell bamboo fabric as it is manufactured with the use of recycled water and chemicals that don’t get released into the environment and cause harm to it.
4. Fine Bamboo
Fine bamboo is nothing but bamboo fiber; the production of fine bamboo is a tiresome job as it is pretty time-consuming; the entire process is done manually by hand, and for the most part, machines are not used in the making of fine bamboo. Lots of workers come together to break down the bamboo into a pulp; this results in a more coarse and less comfortable material than the other forms of fabrics that we have discussed in this section.
Note: 95% of the bamboo fabric that you see in the market is nothing but bamboo viscose. We didn’t mention bamboo linen because it is pretty much similar to fine bamboo; its production takes a lot of time, and the final result isn’t even soft.
The Issue With the Use of Bamboo
Here are concerning things about the production of bamboo that everyone needs to know before hammering down bamboo as a sustainable fabric.
Bamboo is imported from China and India, where worker wages are pretty low. In addition to this, brands are not always transparent about the difficult conditions in which their workers harvest bamboo and convert it into the smooth fabric that they like.
Bamboo, as we said, is in pretty high demand these days. As a result, lots of farmers are now cutting down natural vegetation in order to grow monoculture plantations of bamboo plants. This results in the use of unstable practices to increase production and profits.
Is Single-use Bamboo Better than Single-use Plastic?
We have seen lots of food and beverage brands now moving to single-use bamboo cutlery, but does it really make that big of a change?
See, bamboo has a higher carbon footprint than plastic because the production of bamboo requires more resources than the production of plastic. As a result, single-use bamboo cutlery is of no good because it has to be used multiple times to make the carbon footprint lower than plastic.
On the other hand, we need to look at the other aspects of plastic use; for instance, plastic takes 100s of years to break down and to properly dissolve in nature, it takes around 3000 years. In addition to this, plastic breaks into smaller pieces, which results in micro-plastic that pollutes sea water, land, and even air. When comparing plastic with bamboo we can see that bamboo can be easily decomposed in nature.
Any product made from bamboo should not be disposed of in normal bins as it cannot be broken down in landfills, where most people throw it away. One needs to understand that bamboo requires oxygen to decompose, and in the landfills, there is very little oxygen present. So when we put bamboo cutlery in a bin, it will not reduce the waste present in the landfills, unless we start decomposing them in a proper manner.
So Is Bamboo Sustainable?
See, bamboo can be sustainable if it is used properly; it is sustainable when it is used in its raw form and when it is not processed. The raw form of bamboo is ideal for making furniture and kitchen items like chopping boards and even utensils like steamers.
In contrast, bamboo cannot be considered sustainable if it is turned into fabrics because the process of converting raw bamboo into wearable fabric uses lots of heavy chemicals, and the manufacturing process is not good for the environment. So, third-party regulations need to be in place to ensure that brands are following proper sustainable practices.
The manufacturing process of a sustainable fabric has a number of layers; some are sustainable some are not. The landscape of the fashion industry is ever-changing. Still, it is pretty crucial for us as consumers to understand the journey of our clothes from seed to garment to be a more educated buyer.