Right off the top I can think of three terrific reasons to go ahead and upgrade your floor with bamboo. By the way if you do decide to go for it then you might want to consider morning star bamboo flooring. They have been around a long time, make a terrific product and back it up with a crazy 30 warantee.

So, those reasons I mentioned. Well I often write about ecological matters so we’ll start with that. Bamboo is a grass, it will grow much faster than traditional hardwood and not need to have seedlings planted. Like your own lawn, after being cut it will continue to grow as long as the root system is healthy. To compare with a typical flooring wood like oak – oak will take about fifty years to mature and need a small army of tree planters to replace them. Bamboo will reach maturity in four or five years.

Next reason, hardness & durability. Bamboo has been tested over and over again and always comes out near the top. There are some vendors that make wild claims about how far ahead it is. This claims may be tilted a bit but we can conservatively say that is at least equal in hardness with traditional hardwood floors.

Finally we’ll just touch on installation. Bamboo flooring can be installed by the method preferred by your contractor. Planks can be purchased with traditional tongue and groove or with the Click-Tight grooves. It can be put down as a floating floor or each plank can be glued down to a sub-floor, the choice is yours.

Do a bit of research yourself and you will quickly see how many advantages bamboo flooring has. A great look, competitive price and great for the environment.

Sustainable woods are harvested from trees that are selectively cultivated and then harvested, rather than entire swatches of forest being cut down. This minimalizes damage to the environment and saves more trees, as well as allowing trees to regrow at a rate sufficient enough to replace those that are cut down. Most sustainable wood costs the same as its standard counterparts, so cost is not prohibitive. A non-profit organization, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), exists to monitor the techniques used to raise and harvest the trees, and certify that the wood is indeed a “green” alternative harvested using proper sustainable practices. The FSC has a list of 57 criteria that must be met before the product can be certified, and these stringent standards help to ensure that the harm to the environment is reduced as much as possible. FSC-certified lumber is beginning to become more and more widely available, though currently it still only makes up a very small portion of a retailer’s stock.

In addition to sustainable wood, there are alternatives to wood that retain many of the looks and qualities that consumers want from a hardwood floor. Bamboo is an exceedingly quick-growing variety of grass with a growth cycle that allows it to be sustainably harvested approximately every seven years, and is extremely abundant. You can get bamboo flooring, bamboo blinds, exterior wooden shutters, and many other household goods  as well as very cheap furniture that uses this great material. Synthetic wood also provides another alternative with the same aesthetically-pleasing appearance of a standard hardwood floor. Made from wood scraps that are broken down and then reassembled with durable low-toxicity glue, engineered wood is then covered with a veneer to give it the appearance of a normal plank of wood. These synthetic boards are extremely sturdy and recycle materials that are left over, reducing waste and preserving resources.

Linoleum is another environmentally-friendly flooring material, and is among one of the most effective in terms of reducing impact on the environment. Linoleum is made from renewable resources such as tree sap, wood flour recycled from lumber mills, and renewable cork flour made from the bark of the cork tree. Linoleum is fairly durable, and due to its organic nature, when it is finally removed it will biodegrade rather than filling up landfills. New designs also allow linoleum to be installed more easily, rather than the standard time-consuming method of gluing down large sheets of it. Some brands even feature a system that allows linoleum tiles to be “clicked” together, similar to the tongue and groove system in cork or hardwood floors. This also limits the use of potentially harmful adhesives and glues, further reducing any impact on the environment.