Eco-Friendly Flooring

Keeping in the vein of DIY and the like, I thought I should do a post on eco-friendly flooring options for your home. Of course, I doubt anyone reading a blog like this has virgin hardwoods from the remote jungles of Asia underfoot, but we can all do better all the time. While you may have something like a laminate on your floor right now, there are a lot of low-cost options out there for upgrading your flooring that are both eco-friendly and very attractive. Thankfully, there are a lot of options around these days to ensure that you don’t have to compromise style in pursuit of good sense.

The two most common ways that people buy eco-friendly flooring is by buying flooring that is made out of a material that can be raised sustainably or made out of reclaimed wood. I’ll go over both of them below, but I’d like to insert my own little plug for bamboo before I go any further. Bamboo is an absolutely amazing material that has a number of uses around the world. Here, we seem to be stuck in this mentality that it’s just an ornamental plant that we put in gardens, but it’s actually an amazing building material. The thing you have to remember about bamboo is that it can splinter and give you some wicked bad splinters in your feet. However, you can easily avoid having this happen to you by making sure your floor is properly sealed and that you do proper maintenance on it.

That leads me into the idea of using flooring that is made out of more sustainable materials. Bamboo grows extremely fast, a lot of it can be grown in tight spacing, and it is an unbelievably useful material. It requires very little maintenance, however it does require a good bit of water to keep vibrant. On the other hand, using reclaimed wood is about as eco-friendly as it gets. After all, this is wood that was just heading toward the dumpster before the flooring company rescued it and turned it into something useful. This is a great way to redo your flooring, and is a very environmentally conscious material to use.

jareds | My Bio & Articles

Jared Skye is an environmental scientist and author of sustainability and self-sufficiency themed media.