Bamboo Technology Company Founder Wins “Dreamers Into Doers” Contest; Recognition Includes $10,000 and an Appearance on ‘The Martha Stewart Show’

SEATTLE, WA—Booshoot today announced that its founder Jackie Heinricher has been chosen as the winner of Martha Stewart “Dreamers Into Doers” program – an honor recognizing visionary, entrepreneurial women who have turned their passions into a successful for-profit or non-profit career.

When Kimberly-Clark announced its plan to source 50 percent of its wood fiber to alternative sources by 2025 -- more than the amount that’s in three billion rolls of toilet paper -- the company wasn’t quite sure how it would make that happen.

Mount Vernon-based Booshoot recently landed a deal with Kimberly-Clark to work on developing a mass-market toilet paper using 20 percent bamboo fiber.

TEDx Rainier - Jackie Heinricher

With its well deserved, eco-friendly reputation, companies have been quick to integrate bamboo into product lines and new bamboo-based businesses continue to pop up.

WENDY KAUFMAN: About 60 miles north of Seattle in the community of Mount Vernon, Jackie Heinricher oversees the multiplication of bamboo in a test tube. It took several years of research and development for her company, Boo-Shoot Gardens, to come up with a system for reproducing the plant on a major scale. Although the plant has a reputation for spreading unwanted into neighbors' yards, it isn't easily produced from cuttings or seeds.

BAMBOO is a versatile, ancient plant that shows up in creation myths as well as in pots on Manhattan terraces. It comes in clumping varieties that behave themselves and running “timber” types that spread by rhizomes — great for a grove, but not so good when they are planted as a property screen that escapes into a neighbor’s yard.

But it’s that very vigor that has environmentalists hailing bamboo as the new “It” plant for saving the earth.