Ocean Build

Ocean Build makes structural bamboo panels: corrugated sheets for roofing, flat and sandwich panels for interiors, built from rapidly renewable bamboo with no formaldehyde-added adhesives. Cement and steel account for roughly a fifth of global emissions, and in the places urbanizing fastest they are also the only heat-shedding roof on offer, which makes the material both a climate problem and a comfort problem for the people living under it.

Bamboo regrows in years rather than decades and stores carbon while it does, so a panel that meets the performance bar carries a small fraction of the embodied carbon of the fiber cement or metal sheet it replaces. Building materials are decided on price, availability, and habit. A bamboo panel that competes on those terms, in the markets doing the most building, is worth more than a better material nobody specifies.