“We’re working on building blocks, a sort of exoskeleton or carapace made of bamboo strips, which will be able to trap aggregates from wind turbine blades to be recycled, for example”, explains Bernard Derrien, founder of the start-up, which was set up in June 2024 and employs around ten people, some of them also carpenters or recyclers.
A bamboo frame
The first stage of the patented process involves the splitting and fully automated gluing of 32 bamboos per second. The bamboo is then transformed into 80x120cm panels made up of 2 overlapping layers bonded with an 80% biobased polyurethane glue.
Glued together, these panels can replace OSB (Oriented Strand Board) for formwork, facades and beams.
Bambooneo then uses them to make 40×20 cm, 40 mm-thick bricks made from 25 strips of bamboo that can be criss-crossed and fitted together like Lego bricks. More rigid than wood, these bricks can then be used to make double partition walls that can be filled with dry earth mixed with bark or granulated composites.
“Soil can be replaced by granulated composites, because the weight and thermal inertia benefits are significant. Using composites as filler also means that fewer trees must be cut down to make the frames. Whenever possible, we try to use waste instead of earth. This makes the walls very solid and dense, with good insulation. Composites are in fact a better insulator than soil. You can incorporate 60 kg of composites per m2 of wall”, explains Bernard Derrien.
Reducing the footprint of composites
Bambooneo tries to find raw material directly from manufacturing sites. “We take care of everything “, says Bambooneo, “we go out to construction sites with crushers on lorries to recover wind turbine blades or catamaran rudder parts such as rudders. Then we shred them on site, with three different levels of shredding depending on requirements. We don’t need to separate the components. Our technology is equally suited to composite scrap from the automotive, aerospace and marine industries”, continues Mr Derrien. As the composites used are not mixed with other ingredients, they can be reused as they are when the walls are dismantled.
To complete its range, Bambooneo also offers a product aimed more at composite material manufacturers. These are chips made with the external faces of small bamboos less than 25mm in diameter. “These compact, dense reinforcements contain more lignin than teak, and a significant amount of silica. Some of our customers are currently testing it to improve their carbon footprint”, explains the start-up’s founder.
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