Kawayan Collective - a bamboo social enterprise

I am so glad to be able to feature Kawayan Collective in Better Bamboo Buildings. I first heard of Ray and Amy from when they attended Bamboo U Bali and subsequently from a couple of bamboo friends in the Philippines. Please read on for more on Kawayan Collective, their team, their journey and story so far.

About Ray & Amy and Kawayan Collective: Our mission is to elevate bamboo as a sustainable, durable, beautiful building material and our vision is better homes for all Filipinos. Our logo is a butterfly because it is a symbol that means many things to us: transformation, propagation and rebirth. It is also a reference to the butterfly effect —that one small change in behavior can ripple to make a big impact. We opened April 1, 2019, but our team has over 20yrs experience treating and crafting bamboo. When you purchase Kawayan Collective bamboo, you know you are buying local, sustainable, high-quality goods made by a company that cares for people, place and profit equally.

Married couple, Ray and Amy Villanueva co-founded Kawayan Collective in 2019. Ray is a dual citizen, Filipino-American architect and Amy is an American social entrepreneur. Both are committed to Kawayan Collective’s vision of better homes for all Filipinos and elevating Philippine bamboo as a modern building material.

1. How did it all start?

We started working with bamboo in 2012 when we had the opportunity to start a design build program at Foundation University in Dumaguete City, Philippines. In collaboration with Foundation University President Dean Sinco, we started Estudio Damgo, a capstone program wherein senior architecture students design, research, fundraise, and build a community structure during their last year of university.

We already believed the natural choice for construction was bamboo since it is abundant, affordable, and embedded in the local culture. But in collaborating with local artisans and learning more, Ray fell in love with the material as a designer and Amy saw the immense potential in bamboo as a social entrepreneur. After founding Estudio Damgo, we each had the opportunity to work for organizations at the forefront of social enterprise and modular home design: Amy worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ray worked for Katerra, the fastest growing home builder in the US. But we continued to look for opportunities to get back into Philippine bamboo!

In late 2018, we formalized a launch partnership with Base Bahay Foundation to start Kawayan Collective. Base, with support from the Hilti Foundation, has done years of research in bamboo and is building social housing using cement bamboo frame technology accredited by the National Housing Authority of the Philippines. We love that Base Bahay is trying to change the perception of bamboo as a long-term, durable building alternative and making homes for the most vulnerable populations. Base’s goal is to build over 5,000 homes in the next 5 years. Our first year of operation was focused on supplying these projects. And starting in 2020, Kawayan Collective opened our doors to other customers, products, and projects with the mission to make treated bamboo affordable and accessible to all.

2. You are a very rare commodity in bamboo especially in the Philippines - you have a bamboo processing factory and you have tied this in with a social and community priority. Tell us more about this. Why is it called Kawayan Collective?

A social enterprise is a “triple-bottom line” business -- we measure our success by the difference we make for the people we serve, the place we operate in and our ability to make a profit. We believe this makes us a far stronger company than a simply profit-driven business. We hold ourselves accountable to the mantra “leave it better” in all aspects.

People: Starts with our team and extends quickly to our suppliers and customers -- we value each person’s contribution. We know our sum is greater than each individual part, so we call ourselves a “collective” -- and while we launched as a sole-proprietorship, our dream is to convert to a locally owned cooperative, with farmer and worker partners as co-owners each invested in the long-term success of Kawayan Collective. Bamboo has long been a community resource in the Philippines, and we intend to honor that tradition in our company’s legal structure and mission.

Place: Stands for Mother Earth -- the only home we have! In every aspect of our business, from how we harvest, treat and use our product -- we keep our environment top of mind. We’ve chosen bamboo for it’s amazing properties as a plant that is endemic to the Philippines, fast-growing, that holds together the soil in which it grows and sequesters carbon at a rate of two tons per year. When you harvest bamboo, you do not kill the mother plant, but encourage more culms to sprout -- thereby making it the only “wood product” in construction that is carbon positive. When you use treated bamboo in your housing project, especially in the Philippines and other tropical countries, you are using a light-weight, durable material that keeps buildings cooler while being strong enough to withstand typhoons and earthquakes much better than concrete hollow block and steel.

Profit: This is our means, not our end-goal. By successfully building a profitable business, we ensure the sustainability of our operations and continued efforts to elevate bamboo as a modern building material and build better homes for all Filipinos (and beyond).

3. Can you please share about the type of bamboo you use, where is it harvested and the production process of bamboo before it is sent out for construction? (This will be useful to hear especially from a specialist viewpoint rather than a textbook or hearsay.)

We use primarily bambusa blumeana (locally known as kawayan tinik), one of six endemic Philippine species of bamboo best-suited for construction. Our bamboo is all harvested within 15km of our facility from wild stocks located on public and private land. We practice sustainable harvesting so that we can return to the same clump year-after-year. Construction-ready poles are between 3-5yrs old to ensure good wall thickness, but cut before rot sets in (bamboo poles typically die after seven years on the clump). This ensures that the mother clump remains at least 60% intact to nurture regeneration.

To ensure our bamboo is powder beetle and termite-free every piece must go through a four-step process:

Step 1: Washing -- Bamboo naturally contains a lot of starch. By submerging the fresh-cut bamboo completely in running water for a few days, we are able to remove the starch that the powder beetle finds so tasty.

Step 2: Drying -- By sun-drying our poles for at least 5 days, we reduce the moisture content of the pole to about 33% -- thereby preparing the pole to be able to absorb the maximum amount needed for treatment.

Step 3: Treatment -- Every pole is fully submerged to absorb the maximum amount that’s needed for treatment. We use a boron or permethrin solution and this is the final guarantee against termites. There is no waste in our process because the poles go into the solution already cleaned and dried so that the treatment never needs to be replaced, only added to as the poles soak up more solution.

Step 4: Seasoning -- Finally, all our treated bamboo is carefully stowed in covered storage racks that allow for airflow while keeping the bamboo out of the sun and rain.

Treated bamboo will last as long as any treated wood. With proper design, bamboo will last a lifetime and more, we guarantee it.

4. What are the main challenges in bamboo treatment and how are you approaching these challenges?

There are four main challenges:

Supply: The initial fear was there may not be enough bamboo supply. Each Base Bahay house requires over 100 treated poles at various lengths and we needed to find at least 3,000 mature clumps within the province to ensure a sustainable harvest, year after year. Many people assumed that there was not enough supply because there had never been this level of concentrated demand. However, bamboo has long been used in the area to strengthen river banks, mark property boundaries and provide free housing material to those living nearby. In the first year of operating we have been able to sustainably source over 12,000 poles from within 10km of our site alone.

Proof: Whenever a new company starts producing a new product, there is going to be a threshold of skepticism to overcome. The best way to do that is through proof of concept. Thankfully, Kawayan Collective can benefit from those who have built with treated bamboo before us. This includes the revered examples of Japan, Columbia and Indonesia -- but more close to home, our predessesor Buglas Bamboo Institute was a non-profit operating in Negros Oriental from 1994-2012. As a non-profit, their mission was to encourage the cultivation, treatment and artisanship of bamboocraft. The treatment process they used was very similar to the one we use today -- and so when people ask, “how do I know your treatment works?” We can point to nearby examples of buildings already 20 years old and still insect-free.

Market demand: Proof and demand are closely related. As a rule, there are only a few “early-adopters” ready to try a new product. Thankfully, our launch partnership with Base Bahay guaranteed our new business with a base-level production order from which to get the facility running. This has been key. Base needed more supply and we needed an initial supply order to justify the cost for launching the facility. After one year of operating, we were able to demonstrate to other customers, we knew what we were doing and could be trusted to deliver a high-quality product in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us all to stay flexible and open about who our customer is and what they may need. Very quickly we went from a construction supply company to a furniture maker -- building bamboo beds for quarantine facilities to stay open and help our community in this time of need. Ultimately, we are working hard to ensure our customer base is diverse and that we are in close communication, so we can stay relevant, affordable, and continue to grow our impact.

Length of Processing Time: The next big challenge on the horizon for us is processing time. We want to grow responsibly. We cannot outpace our supply or make our customers wait six months for their product. We look to add machinery and staff so that one enhances the other. We could probably safely continue to operate at our current rate, but it wouldn’t make much of an impact on mainstream construction practices -- so we continue to push ourselves to think bigger, faster, better.

5. What is your favourite all time bamboo building/designer and why?

Work by Simon Velez, VTN Architects, and IBUKU is inspiring because they push our understanding of bamboo’s potential. Local Filipino Architect, Rene Armogenia, has been a mentor and proves that the same level of craft can be achieved in the Philippines.

But we know projects like these are not done by one person, but by a whole community of believers who share a common vision. Because of this, our favorite all time bamboo building is a personal choice.

The Dunga Daycare Classroom is a one-room bamboo and rammed-earth structure in the mountains of Negros Oriental, Philippines. It is the first project of Estudio Damgo, the design + build program we started at Foundation University in Dumaguete City, Philippines. It is our first bamboo baby and how we fell in love with the material.

The leaders of the project were two architecture students with no experience in construction and no real world experience in design. This is how all Estudio Damgo design-build projects start - overwhelming and scary. Students quickly realize how to learn by doing, take it one day at a time, and that communication is very important.

Now the program is in its 9th year with different types of community and public structures built. Each year it is amazing to see the transformation of a new set of students, community clients, building users and how bamboo is at the center of it all.

6. I hear that Kawayan Collective is participating in a bamboo research study - please tell us more.

We continue our partnership with Base Bahay through research. Base Bahay’s new bamboo testing facility in Manila has brought world class research collaborations to the region. One of these studies to be conducted with Kawayan Collective is in partnership with Engineer Luis Lopez, Head of Techonology at Base Bahay Foundation, and with Dr. David Trujillo, Assistant Professor at Coventry University (United Kingdom). Dr. Trujillo is one of the authors of international standard ISO 19624 and the Chair of INBAR’s construction task force.

Even though bamboo has been used for centuries, there is a lack of standards that relate to whole culm round bamboo. In this research project we will be piloting the implementation of ISO 19624, the structural grading of bamboo culms for construction. Specifically, we will be establishing a set of non-destructive visual and mechanical grading criteria to sort bamboo poles for structural applications.

The result of the study is to be able to implement a quality standard for whole culm bamboo. This is an essential step in approving bamboo for the building code and will equip architects, designers, and engineers with the information they need to ensure the safety and quality of bamboo structures.

In addition to this study, we will also be performing more treatment studies to ensure that we can offer the best product.

7. What would be your advice to those who are enthusiastic and want to make a start in bamboo?

Move to where bamboo grows and start building with it. Or spend your time in school developing the body of bamboo research and application. As compared with other construction materials (endemic to or manufactured in the northern hemisphere) -- bamboo lacks documentation and codification. Become a bamboo structural engineer! Your skills are in high-demand. As an entrepreneur, look for problems that bamboo is well-suited to solve. Remember, it is not a magic wand -- if it takes a lot of manufacturing to turn bamboo from a giant grass into disposable cutlery, it may not be as sustainable as moving to finger foods. :)

8. What would you say would help bring bamboo to the forefront as a material for the 21st century?

Plant and maintain more bamboo forests. Conduct and publish research. Develop standards so that builders, designers, architects, engineers can safely design and build with it. Share your proven processes and technology to lower barriers to entry for new bamboo products and designs. It may increase competition -- but at this stage -- that’s what we want! We need to get out of the niche market and into the mainstream for bamboo to really make a dent in reducing the construction industry’s carbon footprint.