5 Best Eco-Friendly Flooring Options for Your Home

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Author – Amber Roy

Flooring is an essential aspect of construction that can enhance the overall look of home interiors. It can make your home look spacious and have a significant impact on your room’s mood as well. While there are numerous flooring options that fit your preference, increasingly, the consequences of climate change need to be considered. As national governments and agencies pay more attention to this pressing issue, ‘going green’ has become a new mantra for many consumers.

So, eco-conscious consumers are seeking flooring options while designing their eco-friendly homes. Today, there are a great number of eco-friendly flooring options available that can make your home a fresh, contemporary look. Here are four such fantastic flooring options to consider:

Bamboo Flooring

Strand-Woven-Bamboo

Bamboo flooring is a good alternative to hardwood flooring. Bamboo wood has similar characteristics to hardwood. It is lightweight but strong and available in many different shades. So it’s easy for you to pick the right tone that best complements your interior and exterior decor.

Bamboo is pretty easy to install, durable, and easy to maintain. Its ease of customization makes bamboo flooring contributes to its rising popularity. In addition, this is an eco-friendly option since it is sustainably grown and it only takes five years for a bamboo plant to mature fully. Further, its production creates waste material that is fully biodegradable.

Polished Concrete

Although it may sound a little basic, polished concrete is gaining popularity over time. Polished concrete is often the most practical option for commercial premises due to its hardwearing, easy and smooth surface. Residential areas need a proper flooring pattern and proportional concrete quantity. For proportional concrete quantity to floor pattern, try to enter the area and volume of concrete in a concrete calculator. This ensures adequate concrete for residential areas. If it is polished and finished with the colours of furniture and other décor items, it can give your entire space a fantastic modern look. Further, concrete flooring such as red-oxide or yellow-oxide flooring are quite cost-effective as well.

Unlike tiles, which can break easily and are unable to withstand high pressure, concrete flooring is durable and does not need to be replaced. The best part is, it is easy to clean. Give polished concrete flooring a try; it can blend easily with your aesthetics. Concrete flooring does not emit any harmful chemicals and gives clean air quality since it does not allow allergens to settle. It keeps the temperature regulated, absorbing heat during the daytime, and releasing it during the night. Further, polished concrete blends very well with any engineered stone such as quartz worktops in London.

Laminate Flooring

Laminate flooring is known to be less toxic than linoleum and is made by combining renewable resources. It is the cheapest flooring option and it is partially recyclable as well. Laminate flooring is considered a fantastic alternative to wood flooring due to its lower cost. What makes it eco-friendly is the manufacturing process; laminate flooring is made from waste products, e.g. tree bark or sawdust, along with waste wood, minimizing the environmental impact.

Laminate flooring is water-resistant and has many layers that enable it to withstand high pressure. Further, it is designed to be scratch-resistant and to repel moisture. However, it is not as durable as wood and may last only for 10 to 13 years.

Natural Stone Flooring

Natural stone makes for an ideal eco-friendly flooring option since it is a totally natural product. That means it’s durable, low maintenance, and it won’t emit harmful gases into the environment, and it requires minimal resources to produce. However, you must check if it sourced locally or brought from abroad, which adds to its carbon footprint.

Stone deck flooring is ideal for damp areas of your home such as frontyards, toilets and backyards. There are a wide range of fabrication options and finishes that can be applied to natural stone that will also enhance its performance, including extending its life, resisting weather and wear and tear, or making the stone more slip-resistant.

Cork Flooring

Cork flooring is a novel entry into the flooring market. Cork only seen on walls, but now it has been utilized as an excellent material for flooring. Cork grows naturally as the springy bark of the cork oak tree. When cork bark is harvested from a mature tree, the tree typically replenishes its outer bark within three years, thus making it a good renewable resource.

Cork is insect repellent, anti-allergen, and has anti-microbial properties to ensure clean air quality within the house. Due to its natural, springy quality, cork gives a soft cushioning effect to the feet. No waste is produced during the manufacturing process. This makes it an excellent eco-friendly flooring and decking option. Today, there is a wide range of composite decking ideas available to improve your outdoor living space.

The Bottom Line:

Thanks to emerging technology, there is an urgency to find new eco-friendly flooring options for building materials. There are now a wide range of options available that can help us play our part in conserving the environment whilst modernizing and improving homes and interiors.

1 COMMENT

  1. Thanks for the awesome post Amber, loved it. Out of many contents out there this one I found most suitable and informative. I am willing to install bamboo flooring as it is eco-friendly and easy to install. Keep up with the great work!

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