With the push on being eco-friendly being ever so strong this year, many people may choose to use earth friendly flooring when remodeling or building a new home. There are several choices of flooring that are considered “green” options when it comes to flooring. Many carpets are now being made from recycled products and these tend to have lower VOC’s than previous materials that carpets were made from. It seems as though the carpet industry has finally found ways to allow the carpets that are put into homes to be a little healthier for the home owner. However, there are also choices like bamboo, cork, and even linoleum.

You may be surprised to know that linoleum is an environmentally friendly flooring option. It has been used in homes for many years, but most of it is made of a vinyl product. However, true linoleum is made from tree sap, wood flour, and linseed oil, making it very earth friendly. Linoleum is easy to install and it not the products that our grandparents had in their kitchens. Linoleum today is biodegradable and can even be burned in power generating furnaces when it is no longer in use. This could be considered the original in green flooring.

The one green option that most people know of is bamboo. Many uses of bamboo are now in existence in earth friendly products. Hardwoods are usually the choice of flooring for all homeowners who want wood floors. With hardwoods being a perennial favorite and with responsible forestry like hillman hardwood flooring, that is not a problem, but the options for wood floors can be so much more. Some of the new green wood options are bamboo and eucalyptus. These woods provide the same solid, beautiful wood floors that the hardwoods do. The great thing about bamboo is that it is a rapidly growing wood and much easier and faster to be harvested than traditional woods.

When looking to do wood floors, be sure to check with the Forest Stewardship Council for a list of LEED certifications. Also, check with companies that salvage wood from demolition projects as you might find some nice wood that can be used for flooring that is recycled. There is nothing that says an old piece of wood can not make a nice new floor.

Also, when looking for carpet for the floors in your home, be sure to find carpet with low VOC content. The best green option for carpet is to buy recycled carpet or at least carpet made from recycled materials. Carpet can be made from recycled pop bottles, corn, and many other plastic materials. It all depends on how much attention you pay to what you are buying. The pricing is about the same as traditional carpet, but it will save the landfills from several billions of pounds of carpet being added to the landfills every year.

Whatever material you choose to use for flooring, make sure that it is an earth friendly product and one that will sustain the use that it will be put too. Cork and bamboo are both very sustainable products if looking for wood and have very different textures to both make for beautiful floors. Choosing the product that will be under your feet is important but choosing a product that will not end up in a local landfill is more important in the recycling world that we live in today.