Completed Project: Prefabricated Modular Bamboo Houses

Project Description

The project promoted the use of bamboo for pre-fabricated housing by producing, assembling and finally demonstrating 20 pre-fabricated bamboo modular houses, as a demonstration of importance of using local available bamboo as construction material in the earthquake-affected area in Sichuan Province, China. The project demonstrated how a renewable, inexpensive, environmentally friendly, quake-resistant, locally available material could provide safe and sustainable alternative to the local inhabitants in a quake prone area.

Current status

The project is completed following guidelines and road maps provided by CFC and INBAR. Assistance were also there from good works of project partners like FNCCI, Unique Bamboo, Nepal and FeMSEDA, Ethiopia. Local institutions from China also collaborated greatly along the implementation phase of the project to promote bamboo as an eco-friendly building material to replace other unsustainable building materials. This biofriendly alternative provided the local people enough employment while meeting the need of their housing materials locally.

The project also made the following achievements, in both Nepal and Ethiopia, including:

• The establishment of three pre-processing centers to turn bamboo into mats and curtains. When in full operation, each pre-processing center could produce 450 sheets of curtains and 80 sheets of mats daily.
• The establishment of one processing center to process bamboo mats and curtains into panels. When in full operation, each center could produce 3,000 m3 of panels annually for building construction, furniture and internal decoration.
• This helped restoration of an old Unique Bamboo Factory in Nepal that was operating under capacity and inefficiently, resulting low productivity and high resin consumption. Using onsite experiences from projects in China, Unique Bamboo technicians learned about bamboo plywood technology including glue making. The old factory is now efficiently producing not only bamboo mat board, but also bamboo -wood plywood.
• One each demonstration house (40m2) using Chinese bamboo and structural parts constructed in both Kathmandu , Nepal and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, has widely attracted public attention for the great potential of bamboo and bamboo panels as eco-friendly building material for civilian construction.
• A Technical Manual on Prefabricated Modular Bamboo Houses is published, with main contents of:

1. Technology and equipment for making bamboo plywood products
2. Draft standards of structural grade bamboo plywood products
3. Properties of bamboo plywood products made from Nepal and Ethiopia bamboos
4. Construction and maintenance of bamboo panel prefabricated houses.

This manual is a collection of advanced and practical technology on production and utilization of structural grade bamboo based panels, and will be a good reference for scientists and professionals in bamboo based panels industry in tropical Asia, Africa and the rest of the world.

The project has trained about 40 technicians each from Nepal and Ethiopia.

In recent years PEA/ICBR has regularly organized international seminars and training course annually, with total participants about 200, including government officers and professionals, to disseminate the project results on promoting bamboo as an eco-friendly building material to replace unsustainable building materials.

ICBR will keep close contacts with Nepal and Ethiopia Project partners and offer appropriate assistances, when necessary, for the continuation and sustainability of this bamboo housing project in future.

CFC will continue its efforts in developing and promoting bamboo as an eco-friendly building material to replace unsustainable building materials. Such practices not only provide jobs and eco-friendly alternatives, it also encourages people to take care of their nature and stem deforestation in the process.