'Green' Flooring Options

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Everything from carpet to hardwood. Learn what kinds of environmentally-friendly flooring options are available. You might be surprised at the number of choices you now have!

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David Lupberger on Green Flooring Options: Hi, I'm David Lupberger with ServiceMagic.com. In this video we are going to spend a couple of minutes talking about green flooring and what's available in the area of green flooring. I'm here with Brandy LeMae of Vast Architecture and she is going to tell us about some of the things that are available.
Brandy LeMae/VaST Architecture: Yea thanks David. Here we are at Ellies Eco Home Store in Boulder Colorado. And we've pulled out some sample of some green flooring and the first ones I want to talk about here are carpet. Now typically I like to avoid carpet because typical carpet is made form petroleum based products and isn't great for our environment. But these samples that I've pulled out- the first one here is a natural wool carpet and has a jute backing so it's marked form all natural and renewable resources and it's got a really great feel to it. What I've got here are some small samples of carpet tile which generally come 18 x 18 they can contain recycled content if you specify them that way. And what's really great about carpet tiles is if something gets stained or damaged you don't have to pull out the entire carpet you only have to pull out the tiles that has become stained or damaged. It really reduces our carbon footprint by reducing the amount of materials that we use over the life of the carpet. Here we have cork and what's really unique about cork is you don't actually kill the tree when you harvest the material to make the flooring; you actually just peel off the bark. Next to that we have bamboo which is a really beautiful material; looks very similar to hardwood but it's actually a rapid growing grass type plant so it's a rapidly renewable resource. The next one we have is reclaimed wood flooring which is another way of saying recycled wood flooring and that wood can come from places like old barns or reclaimed wood flooring from other houses. And lastly we have linoleum, which is one of my favorites; it's a great replacement for vinyl flooring which is not very green at all. And linoleum is made from linseed oil and wood pulp so also renewable resources.
Lupberger: Brandy, besides what you have shown us is there some other types of green flooring?
Brandy LeMae/VaST Architecture: There are, some other things that we like to use are concrete, concrete is a great overly especially if you are going to do radiant heat floors and incorporate passive solar design because it has a lot of thermal mass. And it's very durable. And also tiles or stone would be similar to concrete.