Green Homes Special Series: Part Ten: Flooring

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The interest in environmentally friendly floors is growing as people learn about deforestation, air quality, growing landfills and other issues. Whether you’re a core “green” consumer, interested in health issues or just looking for great products at a good price, homeowners can discover many eco-friendly flooring possibilities. Issues of Concern EcoTimber’s White Tigerwood flooring is 100 percent FSC-certified content, made with formaldehyde-free adhesive and more than twice as hard as red oak. © 2008 EcoTimber, Inc. Many factors figure into the idea of green flooring. Those looking at hardwood or engineered wood floors have at least two concerns. “First, there is an increasing awareness today of the destruction of the world’s forests,” says Lewis Buchner, CEO of EcoTimber in San Rafael, Calif. “Forests hold the vast majority of Earth’s plant and animal life. The destruction of forests is the second-largest cause of carbon emissions worldwide—more than all cars, trucks, boats and planes combined. People want to do the right thing and don’t want their flooring decision to add to this destruction. “There’s also the issue of indoor air quality. Remember the fiasco surrounding formaldehyde emissions in the FEMA trailers housing victims of Hurricane Katrina? Most of those emissions came from the adhesives used to bind wood products together. These adhesives are also found in many engineered wood flooring products,” says Buchner. EcoTimber offers domestic and exotic hardwood and bamboo flooring, including prefinished engineered and floating floors with no volatile organic compounds and formaldehyde-free adhesives. This EcoTimber woven bamboo product, made with no added urea-formaldehyde, comes in six-foot lengths and is three times harder than traditional bamboo flooring. © 2008 EcoTimber, Inc. The growing amount of waste going to landfills is another concern. Shaw Industries is one such eco-friendly company. Keeping carpet out of landfills is a key part of its Green Edge program. Public Relations and Media Relations Specialist Mollie J. Allen says the company’s Evergreen facility in Augusta, Ga., recycles Type 6 nylon (N6) carpets and rugs, the ones typically found in American households. The facility breaks down carpets to the raw N6 nylon and remanufactures it into new fiber that can be used over and over without loss of beauty or durability. In contrast to the standard industrial “cradle to grave” approach when a product is discarded at the end of its life, this indefinite reuse of a product’s components for other products is part of the “cradle to cradle” closed-loop model. Its residential carpets do not use a PVC backing; instead, they use one called Softbac. Allen says that while Shaw is researching methods to recycle its residential backing in a

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