September 1, 2020
Bamboo is strong, versatile and fast-growing, and these attributes can also be used to describe Camille Rebelo, the founder of EcoPlanet Bamboo.
Winner of the U.S. Department of State’s 2014 Award for Corporate Excellence, EcoPlanet Bamboo has pioneered the industrialization of bamboo as an alternative fiber for timber manufacturing industries. Founded in 2010, the company has created a sustainably managed resource base of alternative fiber globally by converting degraded land into certified bamboo plantations. The company has proven that Bamboo, combined with innovative technology can change the face of everyday products such as toilet paper and packaging to be more sustainable and truly disrupt large industries that are destroying our world’s natural forests.
In conversation with the co-founder of EcoPlanet Bamboo, Camille Rebelo, we learn more about the sustainable entrepreneur’s journey and the inception of this revolutionary company.
Around the World and Back to her Roots
Camille was born and brought up in Kenya, the center of forest conservation efforts in Africa. Growing up, Camille was “frustrated witnessing grant-driven conversation” where a lot of people, especially westerners wanted to be involved in environmental protection “for personal reasons and for the lifestyle”. She took this African context and understanding and went around the world for education and work, before returning to her home-continent and starting EcoPlanet Bamboo along with Troy Wiseman.
“The critical thing about my background is that I had a diversity of experiences”. Camille was educated in the United Kingdom, and then lived in Southeast Asia, in the Philippines, and then moved to the United States for graduate school. “I came out of grad school at a time when focus on forestry for climate change was key and the advantage that I was given was that I was able to bridge that gap between forestry and the finance and business side”.
But like every entrepreneur, Camille faced setbacks: “I moved to Indonesia and started a company and realized quickly that I had no idea what I was doing”. But her mentor, a Dutch lady, came to her rescue and said to her “leave the company, you can be an entrepreneur later. Give me two years of your life”, and then she sent Camille to country after country for short-term projects. Camille learnt quickly that money is not always the most important thing. “I would be in Mozambique for 10 days and get on a flight to Malaysia for 6 weeks and for a year in my life I didn’t have a place to live”, recalls Camile as she talks about how gaining exposure to different cultures and settings was important to her career.
Camille realized she could be in a village anywhere, do a project and create a great impact on that community but the second part of her career began when another mentor, an environmentalist, told her that the only real way to change the world is to be able to talk to people and associate with people who can change it. “Sadly, that came down to money. It’s much more valuable to go out and get a job where you’re going to earn enough money that people will invite you to the table and listen to you”.
She points out that the biggest success with EcoPlanet was not necessarily her own, it was in finding a partner who came from the business world and believed in environmental and social impact. “Troy was willing to take that risk and had the ability to open the doors for EcoPlanet Bamboo”.
The Power of Bamboo
EcoPlanet Bamboo since its inception has been an archetype for conscious capitalism and proof that business can truly deliver triple bottom line returns. EcoPlanet Bamboo’s success shows that businesses don’t have to choose between earning strong financial returns or maximizing social & environmental impact.
Camille points out that there is a growing need for wood and fiber that is one of the most significant drivers of deforestation and “decreasing availability from natural and plantation forests just can’t meet that demand”. The reason is lack of financial incentive, as tree plantations are expensive and capital intensive; it can take up to 15 to 20 years to see returns on investments. EcoPlanet Bamboo looked for an opportunity where that timeline could be reduced. “Bamboo has two advantages; it overlaps both the economic and environmental aspects”.
Camille writes in her blog that Bamboo is a jewel crop where “money really does grow on trees”. “Bamboo takes between five to eight years and sometimes slightly longer depending on species and climate to harvest. But the biggest advantage thereafter is that once you reach maturity, this turns into an agricultural commodity. So you can harvest a portion of each plant every year and the plant will keep producing as long as it is managed sustainably. And so you have this very different asset class that can suddenly be more attractive to investors that weren’t initially interested in environmental or environmentally positive attributes”.
Bamboo has unparalleled potential from a social perspective too. With traditional land use projects, there is a need for jobs only in the very early years and then perhaps a decade later when you have to harvest the trees. Camille says that with forestry projects “social impact is relatively small per land area and financing as the industry has really mechanized over the last 20-30 years”.
But with bamboo, plantations are very manually intense. “This plant actually requires huge amounts of inputs and care in the early 3 to 4 years and after that you need intensive management and maintenance. And then almost immediately you move into harvesting and because you’re then harvesting every year, creating long term permanent jobs”.
Camille is proud that her Company has created over 500 permanent jobs in Central America and Africa, supporting communities for the next 2 or 3 generations. Camille says that with bamboo farms, opportunities are created in remote areas and people can have job security. “When we hire people, they really know that this is a long-term benefit, and that’s when they start to reinvest in their own futures”.
The Sustainability of Bamboo
Bamboo also provides significant environmental benefits over conventional forest plantations. A grove of bamboo produces a third more oxygen than an equivalent acreage of trees, sequestering dramatically more carbon out of the air helping to mitigate climate change. It can also be cultivated in marginal soil, impeding soil erosion. EcoPlanet Bamboo has sequestered over 1.5m tons of carbon; and restored thousands of acres of degraded land into fully functional and biodiverse ecosystems, truly creating a multi-dimensional sustainable economy for some of the poorest communities in the world.
Not only is bamboo the fastest growing plant in the world, bamboo cultivation is a fast growing industry as well. This bodes will for EcoPlanet Bamboo, which has created a unique niche that can grow where its competitors cannot.
