By Eddie Glenn
CNHI News Service

You may already know that bamboo - the woody, fibrous plant that grows mostly in Southeast Asia - is pretty useful stuff.
You might own a piece or two of bamboo furniture. You might even have bamboo flooring, or bamboo window blinds. Or, if you're a World War II or Vietnam veteran, you may even have seen it used for all kinds of creative anti-personnel purposes.
But do you have a bamboo T-shirt? If not, Rich Delano will be more than happy to sell you one.
For the past couple of years, Delano has operated Bamboo Textile, a California-based company that makes clothing from bamboo fiber. Delano's products are the latest in a trend toward more sustainable agriculture-grown fabrics, and away from the chemical-heavy cotton that has dominated the clothing industry in the United States.
Most of Delano's bamboo T-shirts are 30 percent cotton, 70 percent bamboo, and have a feel that's more like silk than cotton. According to Delano, they won't stick to your skin in hot, muggy weather, and they're anti-bacterial – meaning they won't harbor smelly little germs like 100 percent cotton fabrics will.
"I was really surprised when I first put it on," said Amber Faulkenberry, who has one of Bamboo Textile's bamboo shirts.
"It feels really cool and air circulates right through it, even though it's not see-through at all. I kind of expected it to be rough, like bad toilet paper or something, but it's really smooth."
Delano gets similar comments every day.
"People call and e-mail and say, 'Hey, I love the product. I want to know more about it,'" said Delano, who got interested in bamboo while selling fiber to clothing companies for a Chinese corporation.
"I was selling wood fiber, and it was doing pretty good - they were making panties and robes out of it," said Delano. "I started thinking, 'Why isn't anyone doing anything with bamboo?'"
When he lost his job with the Chinese company, he got the opportunity to delve deeper into that question. He started his own company, importing bamboo fabric from China, but he didn't have a lot of success until his wife came up with an idea that would have a drastic effect on Bamboo Textiles, and – Delano hopes – the entire textile industry, eventually.
"I had all this bamboo, but no one would touch it," he said. "My wife said, 'Hey, honey, why don't you make me a bamboo T-shirt?'"
Delano contacted his suppliers in China, and they weren't sure it could be done, but they were willing to give it a try.
The results were surprisingly cool and comfortable, so his wife suggested he have more made so she could give them away to her fellow nurses and the doctors at the hospital where she works.
The shirts got such a positive response, Delano started selling them at a local market where he was eventually banned: He was getting too much of the other T-shirt vendors' market.
So he hit the road, selling his shirts wherever he could.
"I had a little Porsche, and it would only hold 250 T-shirts," said Delano. "I'd go to these events, and I'd sell out of T-shirts before I even got out of the car. So I sold my car, got a bigger car, and made more T-shirts."
Eventually, his color selection of white, black and gray expanded to include brighter hues, and he's constantly adding variations. The latest is a 95 percent bamboo, 5 percent Lycra camisole.
"This is some pretty breathable stuff," said Fred Cox, as he tried on a bamboo T-shirt for the first time.
"I could see where this would be pretty comfortable in August when it gets to 102 degrees and 90 percent humidity. It's a good Oklahoma shirt."
Which may be because, as a native Texan, Delano's well aware of the humidity factor in the southern Midwest.
He believes that, once people wear a bamboo T-shirt, they'll be hooked, and he wants to make sure his shirts remain affordable for the general public. He sells them for $10 each, half or a third as much as a lot of designer T-shirts.
Affordability, Delano said, is a lesson he learned from one of his clients during his wood fiber-selling days.
"I was at Fruit of the Loom in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I asked them, 'Why do you do so many T-shirts?'" said Delano. "They said, 'Three reasons: Poor people like them, middle-class people like them, and rich people like them.' When I started selling T-shirts, I asked myself, 'Do I want to sell one T-shirt a month, or a thousand T-shirts a month?' I've been at the top, and I've been at the bottom and I know what it's like. I want everybody to be able to wear my T-shirts."
Delano said that, as far as he knows, his company is the first to mass-produce T-shirts using bamboo, but he added there are a lot of other fibers out there just waiting to be processed into clothes.
Hemp has been used for millennia to make rope and fabric. However, it's illegal to grow in the United States and some other countries because of its psychotropic smokable variety, marijuana. Like bamboo, it can be grown with little chemical use, and can be processed into a wide variety of textiles, from clothes to car door panels.
Delano said fiber made from soy – better known as a food ingredient - is also being used to make clothing fabric.
"There's going to be some crazy stuff out there," he said. "I'm not going to do it, because I've already got the bamboo, but coconut fiber could be big. There are a lot of wasted coconuts out there."

Learn more
To find out more about clothing made from bamboo, go to www.bambooclothing.com.

Eddie Glenn writes for the Tahlequah (Okla.) Daily Press.