Eco-debunked: Bamboo vs. Organic Fabric

When at the super market, if I have my choice between organic veggies from Chile vs. veggies from California, I choose veggies from California every time. It's a debate in our house: local vs. organic, which is right? But that's a story for another time.

When it comes to fabric, I started to wonder- bamboo vs. organic?? Bamboo is often touted as being eco-friendly, but really what does that mean? Well, I found one article here, that goes into great depth about the subject. Here's what I came away with:

The bottom line on bamboo. The growing of bamboo is environmentally friendly but the manufacturing of bamboo into fabric raises environmental and health concerns because of the strong chemical solvents used to cook the bamboo plant into a viscose solution that is then reconstructed into cellulose fiber for weaving into yarn for fabric.

Ekk, does that mean that I should shy away from bamboo?? I decided to delve a little deeper and I emailed my good friend who works for Patagonia's Environmental Department to find out more. And wouldn't you know it, Patagonia has an entire policy to not use bamboo based fabric. They have even written an entire Bamboo Chronicle on the subject. And what did they say, well, much like the above article, while growing Bamboo is good, the process to turn it into fabric is far from organic. In their own words:

Patagonia’s material developers have been investigating bamboo
since 2003, but since almost all available bamboo fabric is made
using the viscose process, we do not use bamboo fabric in our
product line.

So there you have it. In the future, I'll investigate the eco-chicness of using bamboo as a wood product, i.e. bamboo flooring. But from now on, my eco-chic fabric inspiration will stick to the organic label. This eco-chic thing is tricky. Do you think that labeling bamboo towels as eco-friendly is green washing?