Have you ever wondered whether bamboo is a tree or a kind of grass? It is a kind of grass in the science of plant. Bamboo is really a wonder of nature. This fast-growing plant can be seen everywhere and is widely used.

Bamboo has got many advantages, leading to its common uses for thousands of years. Bamboo is often used to produce daily products, such as chairs, beds and tables. What’s more, bamboo can be made into a kind of material for clothes. Bamboo can even be used as an excellent building material because it grows fast and it is strong.

Bamboo is easy to decay (腐烂), so people have to add chemicals to make bamboo-based materials (竹基材料) stay for a long time. But these chemicals are bad for the environment. Chinese scientists have kept improving technologies to deal with this disadvantage. Here is a good example. In 2016, a Chinese research team in Nanjing began to work on new bamboo technologies. Later, the team succeeded in developing a new bamboo technology.

The new technology is a heat treatment. This treatment moves decay-causing matters out of bamboo without adding chemicals that are harmful to the environment. At the same time, the structure (结构) of bamboo is well kept. As a result, new bamboo-based materials were produced and chosen as an excellent building material to build the scenic platforms (观景平台) of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge — the world’s largest sea-cross bridge. Since the new bamboo-based materials were used on the platforms, they have stood sunlight, seawater and even the natural disasters. Now, the scenic platforms still remain as strong as ever.