Learn about Green Flooring

David Lupberger: Hi, I am David Lupberger with servicemagic.com. In this video we are going to spend a couple of minutes talking about green flooring and what is available in the area of green flooring. I am here with Brandy LaMae of VaST Architecture and she is going to tell us about some of the things that are available. Brandy LeMae: Yeah, Thanks David. Here we are at Ellie's Eco Home Store in Boulder, Colorado and we have pulled out some samples of some green flooring here. And the first ones I want to talk about are carpets. Now, typically I like to avoid carpet because typical carpet is made from petroleum based products, and isn't really great for environment. But these samples that I have pulled out, and the first one here is a natural wool carpet and it has a jute backing. So it's made from all natural and renewable resources, and it's got a really great feel to it. What I have got here are some small samples of carpet tiles which generally come 18?18. They can contain recycled content if you specify them that way. 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 tile that become stained or damaged. So 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 before and 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. 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. David Lupberger: Brandy, besides what you have shown us, are there some other examples of green flooring. Brandy LeMae: There are some other things that we like to use is concrete. Concrete is a great overlayment especially if you are going to do radiant heat floors and you are incorporating passive solar design into your house because it has a lot of thermal mass and it's very durable, and then also tile or stone would be used similarly to concrete. David Lupberger: Wow! Brandy, thank you! Brandy LeMae: Yeah, thank you!