Over the past five years, the popularity of bamboo has grown at a rapid pace. Suddenly, it's everywhere you look, in everything from floorboards and blinds to furniture and wall cladding. In fact, rapid growth is the very reason bamboo has started to capture the attention of environmentally conscious homeowners and renovators.

"Bamboo is up near the top of the list of renewable resources because it's an incredibly fast-growing grass," says Jennifer Snyders, Director of House of Bamboo, a Sydney business that has been supplying bamboo products for three decades. "It takes about six years for the bamboo species used in bamboo flooring to be ready to harvest. It would take 25 to 30 years for a comparable tree to be ready for use."

Advances in manufacturing boards from bamboo have realised the plant's potential as a flooring material. "The bamboo plant has very strong fibres," says Snyders. When these are woven or compacted together into boards, the result is a hardness rating of 16.1 kilo newtons on the Janka scale, which rates the hardness of woods. "It's tougher than most timbers."

Bamboo's strength and flexibility are of great appeal to Brisbane furniture designer and maker Kent Gration, whose Wambamboo pieces such as the Costello seats above, have won many awards. But it's the material's eco-friendliness that is most attractive, he says. "The major plant system is left intact when culms are harvested and future growth from that plant is normally of better quality - some bamboo species live for over 150 years."

Bamboo plants require little fertiliser or pesticides to grow, and they have the ability to sequester carbon at a greater rate than tree species. Plus, at the end of its life cycle, a bamboo product is biodegradable.

On the negative side, most of the world's bamboo is grown in China and Vietnam, so it has generated quite a few carbon emissions by the time it reaches our shores. And, not all bamboo products are created equally; when you're sourcing bamboo flooring, ask whether chemicals were used in its production and seek out boards made with a low-VOC adhesive.

Perhaps the last word should go to Reece Turner, Forests Project Campaigner for Greenpeace Australia: "There are a few cases where bamboo may come from natural forest sources, and that might mean it's a threatened species. But virtually all bamboo is from plantations or secondary forest areas, so it's nearly always from ecologically sustainable sources."