Sierra Club Green Home

Lighting stores offer a dizzying array of lamps–pendants, sconces, chandeliers, ceiling lamps, table lamps, desk lamps, floor lamps, recessed cans, track lights, and on and on. What makes a lamp green? For the most part, it’s the amount of energy it uses–and that primarily depends on the type of bulb and how much time the lamp is on. So pay attention to those factors, and while you’re at it, be thoughtful about the lamps you choose and where you use them.

Whether you live in a house, apartment, or dorm room, you’ll need furniture to provide a place to sit, eat, and store your stuff. You’ll naturally consider materials, color, quality, and cost. You may also want to use furniture to express your personal style. But what if (as evidenced by your coming to this site) it’s your style to create a healthy home that’s contributing to a healthy planet?

They can do more than keep you dry
At the most basic level, a roof protects you from the elements. And the greenest roof is the roof that lasts the longest. But new kinds of roofs can do more than keep you out of the rain and snow. Some will keep your house cooler, making you [...]

6 ways to set the stage
What’s underfoot is a big deal. Your floors cover hundreds–maybe even thousands–of square feet, affect the look of every room, can use heaps of materials, and therefore come with a big price tag. Fortunately, they also offer you a chance to make positive esthetic and environmental changes. The key is [...]

Floors made of tile, concrete, and stone are long-lived and perfect for some kinds of healthy green homes. Here’s a materials primer to help you decide whether they are a good choice for you.

Ceramic and porcelain tile are made primarily from clay, an abundant although nonrenewable natural resource.

Cork floors were originally made from scrap left over from wine-cork manufacturing, but because of rising demand, many floors are now made with cork harvested specifically for flooring. It comes in tiles or click-together planks, in shades of brown, as well as other colors and patterns. Some products have wood backing covered by a veneer of cork.

Bamboo flooring has the look, feel and durability of wood. This rapidly renewable resource can be harvested in four to six years (compared with decades for most trees used for wood floors). And don’t feel bad about the pandas. Of more than a thousand varieties of bamboo, only a few are used for flooring, and they’re not the ones that pandas eat.

Take pride in a floor made of flax
People often use the word “linoleum” to refer to vinyl flooring. But from an environmental perspective, these two products are poles apart. Vinyl flooring is a petrochemical-based product that produces highly toxic dioxin when it’s being manufactured and may give off phthalates, chemicals that can cause damage to [...]

Good looks, long life

If you have an older home, check underneath the carpeting. It may be concealing a high-quality wood floor that just needs sanding and refinishing. If it isn’t, consider using wood salvaged from old buildings or old factories and barns. And then there’s virgin wood, which can be either solid or “engineered,” with [...]

You’d think a newborn baby would have a fresh start when it comes to toxic chemicals. But chemicals move across the placenta, so a baby emerges with some of the same pollution in its system as its mother. Tests of umbilical blood have detected chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects as well as those that are toxic to the brain and nervous system…