When going green in your home renovations, there are a lot of options out there and choosing between them can be a difficult process. Today, I’ll provide you with some of the more popular environmentally-friendly flooring choices, and what the ramifications are for using them.
Hardwood
One of the best ways to add eco-friendly flooring to your house is to add hardwood flooring. The benefit to this is that is also very attractive and durable.
To make sure your hardwood flooring is eco-friendly, try to use recycled or repurposed wood to ensure that trees don’t need to be cut down unnecessarily. I’ve already mentioned that the ReStores are a good option for getting recycled building materials, but you can also try suppliers like Canadian Heritage Timber.
If the supplies of hardwood are not very plentiful or are not what you are looking for, try to get wood that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC ensures that the wood you are buying has been harvested from a sustainable woodland.
When you are finishing your floors – or even if you are only refinishing them – try to use a non-toxic varnish. Livos Paints is one of many good suppliers to check out.
Bamboo
If you are looking for something different, you might want to try out bamboo flooring. New bamboo flooring is more ecologically friendly than hardwood because bamboo takes only three years to fully mature. Trees, on the other hand, can take decades.
The problem with bamboo is that there aren’t many certifications for bamboo production in place. So, you don’t know if the bamboo has been harvested sustainably. This is a problem when many rainforests are burned down to produce bamboo plantations. The best option is to look for bamboo that has been certified by the FSC.
Image: sleepyneko / Flickr
Cork
Another product that is similar to, but slightly different from wood, is cork. The ecologically friendly aspect of cork is that cork is harvested from the bark of mature trees, and that it does not require the tree to be cut down. However, cork is not certified and most of it comes from Europe, which increases the amount of fuel used to ship it.
Check in again soon when I continue our discussion of environmentally friendly flooring.
Heleen Jacobsen
Broker of Record with InfoMarket Group GMAC Real Estate
www.infomarketgroup.com
