Project granted – Bamboo fiber extraction preprocessing pilot setup
Bambooder is very happy to announce that we have recently obtained a Kansen voor West grant (KvW3-00100) to develop a preprocessing pilot setup to produce the required input for our bamboo fiber extraction processes. The fiber extraction processes at Bambooder require a specific input in the form of slats and chips. At the moment, we see that suppliers are unable to (efficiently) meet our requirements, resulting in a high degree of rejection. Due to the high degree of rejection, a lot more bamboo poles are cut down than actually needed. This is unacceptable as we strive towards the highest sustainability. Furthermore, the process to make the inputs is still relying on manual labor, which is time-consuming, prone to human error, and costly.
With the grant, running from January 2023 until August 2024, we are able to develop a preprocessing line that is able to determine the most efficient way to process a bamboo pole into slats and chips for our bamboo fiber extraction processes. The preprocessing line will feature a high degree of automation to decrease the labor requirement, costs, and chances for errors. We will develop the preprocessing line ourselves to be able to process bamboo from different suppliers and different species of bamboo. The result of this preprocessing line is that we can increase the efficiency of the bamboo forests by decreasing the number of poles needed to obtain a sufficient amount of slats and chips per month. In the end, this will help us to realize a reliable supply chain for bamboo fiber semi-finished products.
