Home Flooring Trends - Bamboo Flooring for Green Building

Home owners today are demanding more eco-friendly products for their home improvement ventures. While home builders are offering a wider variety of flooring materials than ever to install into your new home, only some of these options stand up to the test of being eco-friendly. People are demanding more space and light than ever in their new homes. Gone are the days of allergy causing carpet, replacing it instead are flooring options that add to the natural beauty of the home. Different styles of tiling and hardwood flooring continue to increase in popularity do to their looks and ease of cleaning and maintenance. Once type of flooring in particular stands out as being a renewable resource with minimal impact on the environment while achieving maximum beauty for your home.

This newer option is bamboo flooring. While bamboo has been a popular building material for ages on the Asian continent, it has only been recently that bamboo has become an accepted material for use in homes of the West. Bamboo has the potential to curb the appetite for non-renewable flooring materials such as hardwood. The largest issue with using natural hardwoods in the building process is the growth cycle of the trees involved. Most must grow for upwards of one hundred years before they are ready to be used in the building process. This growth cycle in itself makes hardwood non-renewable. The other issue is the lack of oxygen that the trees would have produced once they are harvested. New seedlings simply can't put out the volumes of oxygen that their full grown counterparts can. Contrast this with bamboo, which actually produces more oxygen per acre than a comparable stand of hardwood trees. On top of that, the process of cutting bamboo for flooring materials does not kill the plant - it will replenish itself and be ready again for harvesting in another five to seven years.

It is easy to see from these numbers alone that bamboo flooring is a much more renewable resource for natural home products. Part of the original challenge in using bamboo in homes in the West stemmed from the fact that solid bamboo planks are simply not as dense or durable as traditional hardwoods. While in the East, home customs and decorating have been very different. Shoes are removed before entering the home and thus the flooring never gets exposed to continual pressure from high heels or kid’s soccer cleats. Furniture is different in the East as well, tending to be lower to the ground and softer in general. Less heavy furniture without the pressure points of something like a large vanity doesn't but as much demand on the flooring. Thus the import of traditional solid bamboo plank flooring directly into American homes hasn't gone over so well. We need more durability and density from our floors to stand up to the punishment we put them through day in and day out. The manufacturers went back to the drawing board so to speak and have developed different types of bamboo floors that will stand up to the pressures of life in the West. The most advanced form of bamboo comes in the form of strand woven bamboo flooring. This is a type of bamboo that uses the entire bamboo plant by first reducing it to its strands. These strands are then combined with an appropriate adhesive material and then subjected to high pressures. The end result of the stranding process is a natural floor board that is orders of magnitude more dense and resilient than the original solid bamboo planks.

In addition, caring for stranded bamboo flooring is very much the same as what the home owner would expect when caring for the hardwood cousin. Strand bamboo flooring stands out among many of the other options as an excellent green building alternative without skimping on quality and durability. When looking to add the beauty of wood to a home, bamboo is the best choice for the environmentally conscious home owner who wants to minimize his or her impact on the environment. These advances in technology of the manufacturing process make it stand out among the other types of bamboo flooring options available today.