The Bamboo Bike Studio is run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.

Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it’s not too soft: “If the bamboo’s too watery, it’s not as dense and it’s not as strong,” Aguinaldo explains.

Aguinaldo makes his living as a bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of making bikes with his friends.

Murray says he finds bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand. Read More… »

Here is a great video produced by Renewable Energy World. A company called SOLARtec is making a shipping container that is a self-contained power grid that supports 1500 people with it’s solar array of 60KW. Read More… »