Green Flooring Ideas

Choosing a Carpet
Avoid carpet containing adhesives, which emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that affect indoor air quality.

The best synthetic-fiber option is solution-dyed, which requires much less water than conventional dyeing methods.

If you choose wall-to-wall carpeting, have the carpet tacked instead of glued to reduce your exposure to the VOCs in adhesives, reduce floor damage, and make the carpet easier to remove.

Consider recycled carpeting. Some carpeting is made with fibers recycled from post-consumer materials such as plastic soda bottles or old carpeting. Mohawk is a manufacturer offering that option.

Bamboo
Bamboo Flooring is gaining in popularity with each passing year. While scientifically classified as a grass, it has been laboratory tested to be 6% harder than the hardest oak flooring.

Because it is technically a grass and a highly renewable source of material, bamboo flooring is an exceptionally eco-friendly product. If you see the benefit in trying to reduce the number of trees cut annually for building materials and other uses, you'll quickly appreciate the environmental value that bamboo flooring provides.

Cork
Cork is an environmentally friendly flooring solution. The cork oak tree is not destroyed and then replanted but rather the bark is harvested from the tree every 9 years, leaving the forest undamaged. It's not unusual to have a 200-year-old tree still producing cork bark. Even better than a renewable resource, Cork is a harvested resource. Only the bark is harvested from the tree, causing no damage to the tree which re-grows new bark.