Inhabitat

Although this product is supercool and readily available, it’s grotesquely expensive for a sheet of plywood made from a grass. We were going to use this for some shelves and discovered it to be roughly 5x the cost of an equivalent thickness of birch veneer plywood. It’s interesting to note that a sheet of this plywood typically costs more per square foot than factory milled bamboo flooring. Hopefully, prices will fall in the near future as the newness of this cool renewable building material becomes more common place.

Hi folks,
Thanks for writing about our plyboo plywoods. Just wanted to chime in to hopefully explain why bamboo-ply (we try to not call it wood) sheet goods are more expensive than flooring. It’s certainly not because we are trying to rip anyone off. Making 4 & 8 sheets of bamboo ply is a lot more labor intensive than producing shorter flooring planks. It is all done by hand and you’re dealing with much longer strips and thus have to be much more precise in the layering process. Also, using this cold press process enables us to keep emission levels at zero, unlike most bamboo floors that are mass produced and often contain higher levels of formaldehyde. In short, bamboo-ply is more of a high quality product and you really get what you pay for. It certainly is higher quality than birch veneer plywood since you’re working with 100% solid bamboo rather than a plywood core with veneer.

I hope this helps.

Sven Eberlein,
Smith & Fong Plyboo

I’d buy the stuff too but 200 bucks a sheet makes it yet another sustainable product that’s really just another luxury product for the rich.

You seem to be comparing apples and oranges. In addition to the cost of manufacturing, Bamboo plywood is a “lumber core” product. This means that it is all bamboo. If you were to price a similar product made from hardwood, you would soon find the price to be more in line. The majority of plywoods have only a thin veneer of the hardwood on the out side and less expensive woods or MDF in the interior. The fact is that you can get bamboo veneers over MDF for a fraction of the cost, if this satisfies your needs. I wish Porche sold their cars for the price of a Volkswagon, but they can’t.

Thanks Michael-

Point taken. I clearly didn’t research the cost of this product enough before I posted this, and I’m sorry you felt mislead. I’ve updated the post to reflect what I’ve learned from this debate, ie Plyboo is crazy expensive! Next time I’ll do better research!

[...] These sleek and sexy chairs are about as sustainable as you can get without sitting in the dirt. According to designer Anthony Marschak, the single curving piece of Plyboo minimizes the weight of the piece and minimizes waste of the materials. A good thing for the manufacturer given the expense of Plyboo. [...]

obviously, plyboo is currently more expensive than it might eventually be, costs generally go down not up on products. How low might it eventually get? Will it ever get down to the point where it’ll be able to compete with traditional plywood?

in the meantime, I just saw a kitchen counter made with plyboo, and it was worth the cost. I think I might pick up a sheet and make some display shelves.

As DIY’ers who have been living for nearly two years without flooring because we are renovating a nearly demo’d building without incurring debt (while I attend school no less) the prices for the product, though the quality may be superb, are absolutely out of range. We do splurge for the good of the earth when the costs are justified but this leaves us going back to the good ole standby, linoleum tiles. If it was good enough for grandma, it’s good enough for us.