Sierra Club Green Home

Be it basic Berber or retro shag, carpet feels good underfoot, absorbs sound, and can add color and style to a room. No wonder it covers nearly 70% of the floors in the United States.

But some indoor-air quality experts suggest thinking twice about blanketing your floors with wall-to-wall fibers. Some new carpets emit a host of noxious chemicals that you’ll be breathing for months and even years after they’re installed.

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 [...]

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Cork floors were originally made from scrap left over from wine-cork manufacturing, but because of rising demand, many floors are now made with cork harvested specifically for flooring.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 [...]

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,” [...]