One livelihood in our town is furniture making...this involves rattan in its' composition.

Rattan belongs to the palm family (Arecales or Palmea), with around 600 species known and 13 genera.

There are different types of RATTAN PALMS, such as HIGH or LOW climbers, SINGLE stemmed or CLUSTERED species. 

Several species are known to reach up to 100m in length!

The majority of the world's rattan are found in Indonesia's forest, with the rest of the world's supply provided by the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Approximately, there are 90 species existing in the Philippines and about 1/3 of them can only be found in the Philippines.

Harvesting

This involves two men, one worker climbs up the palm and tries to remove the shoots tangled up in other supporting trees and plants. The second worker then pulls them from the ground. These then were cut into shorter length for easier transport.

Processing

Our neighbor scraping the Rattan shoots.

Intensive processing follows after sorting the shoot bars according to size, thickness and colouring. The works includes watering, drying, peeling, shivers, scraping, bending, colouring, including special treatments according to their usage.

The hardened outer layer are used in weaving ie. sturdy baskets, mats, bird cages needing coarser wickerwork.

One example used for furnitures is the braiding or weaving work in chair and bed furnitures. This use the softer part or inner layer as it involves intricate designs.

These inner layers are used in the chair and bed parts. Examples in the house :

My mom's reclining bed, she'd have it for more than 10 years.

Still my mom's..it's about 5 years old now.

As anything with wear and tear, these rattan parts can still be replaced or reinforced when already worn. They can easily be bought in the hardware stores.

In the Philippines, commercial rattan tree farms can be found in Mindanao and Mindoro. But regardless, the demand for rattan wood exceeds the supply for exports, which I think the Philippines is importing from Indonesia.

All images are mine and were taken with my Samsung Galaxy S7. Our neighbor did agree to have her picture taken with this post. 

www.insights-philippines.de/rattanenglisch.htm

wwf.panda..org/what_we_do/where_we_work/greatermekong/our_solutions/projects/sustainablerattan/fatcsinformation/

With gratitude for my badge @elyaque!