3 green flooring options

When we think of running a green, sustainable home we might imagine great big solar panels on the roof or a hybrid car parked on the drive.  We often neglect to think about the lower areas of our house, literally the ground on which we walk.

As you know, we love our solar panels here at Chez Green; they’re a great option for green home improvement and energy savings; however, they aren’t always cheap.

There are other options such as the Duro Last roofing for commercial premises to consider that reduce energy consumption without paying the high fees for solar panels.

A couple of years ago we replaced a couple of floors downstairs; would you believe we had both a fire and flood within a week of one another! We settled on wood, but here are 3 other home flooring options and their eco-friendly benefits:

Bamboo:

Most people don’t realise how renewable a resource bamboo is.  It matures in just three years, which is a very short time when compared to most trees and other natural resources used for common flooring.

There are also some other sustainable benefits to bamboo as a flooring option:

• Unnecessary to replant because the entire plant is not harvested
• Minimal pesticides and/or fertilisation is required to grow
• Water-based products usually used to finish
• Installed with low-VOC adhesives

Cork:

If you think cork is only used for stopping up wine bottles or pinning notes on the wall, think again.  Cork comes from the Cork Oak tree in a unique process.

When the tree ages to around 25 years old, the bark can be harmlessly stripped for processing without any negative effects on the tree itself, which lives an average of 250 years or so.

Other sustainable benefits to cork as a flooring option:

• Recyclable
• Renewable
• Can also use water-based products to finish

Stone:

After a three-year study conducted by the Natural Stone Council on the environmental implications of stone use as a building material, it appeared that the practice carried some very real advantages.  The study was completed in 2009 and came up with these benefits for using stone as a sustainable building material:

• It has an incredibly lengthy life cycle
• Zero volatile organic compound emission
• Easy to maintain
• Recyclable and reusable

If you’re considering a green makeover or even just some small green renovations for your home soon, these three flooring options are great ways to begin building from the bottom-up.

What about you – what flooring do you have at home and are you happy with it or would you like to change it?