Eco Friendly Flooring and The 3 R's - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Green is everywhere and the 3 R’s (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) are a big part of this environmental awareness. With flooring, the three R’s are extremely important when it comes to your flooring having an eco friendly lifecycle. Depending on the type of floor covering you have, you can take steps to reduce replacement materials needed over time, and to reuse or recycle your flooring at the end of its lifecycle. Let’s look at some examples of how the 3 R’s and flooring connect.

Reduce

By choosing products with a long lifetime, you can reduce the overall replacement materials needed over a long period of time. This includes high pressure laminate floors that rate high on the AC rating scale, impervious and durable porcelain tiles, hardwoods that rate high on the Janka hardness scale, and other floors with proven durability and a long lifetime. The less you have to replace sections of your floor for repairs and the fewer times you need to completely replace your floors over a long period of time, the greener your flooring experience becomes.

Reuse

With most floors, there will come a time when you are simply ready to replace them. You may be changing your room’s décor and need new floors to match, or the floors may no longer suit your needs. If you are replacing floors that are in good condition, consider other alternatives that you could use them for before disposing of them. Check out this article on how to recycle laminate at home for some crafty DIY projects you can do with used or leftover laminate tiles or planks.

If you can’t find a way to reuse your flooring, maybe someone else can. Floors that are easy to remove and reinstall such as glueless laminate, hardwood, vinyl, and bamboo flooring, removable carpet tiles, and interlocking rubber tiles can often be sold or donated. Popular venues for selling or donating flooring include local community centers, churches, thrift stores, consignment stores, craigslist, eBay, other online auctions, and architectural salvage warehouses.

Recycle

Rather than being disposed of, flooring can often be recycled at the end of its lifecycle. Often times, flooring can be used to make new products or burned in a process called waste–to–energy. Recycling flooring rather than disposing of it helps to protect our landfills from filling with flooring materials that are often not biodegradable. For more information on how to recycle flooring, contact your local recycling agency.

Always remember the 3 R’s when it comes to eco friendly flooring – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.