Best Environmentally Friendly Flooring Company

Cork tile floor from SustainableFlooring.com

Today, the Green Living Examiner tips her hat to Sustainable Flooring in Boulder for being the Best Environmentally Friendly Flooring Company in Colorado!

Why are they the best? As its name suggests, Sustainable Flooring offers a variety of high-quality bamboo and cork flooring materials, which are highly sustainable woods. As you probably know, bamboo stalks have a rapid growth rate, shooting up to 5 feet in just the first few months of growth. Cork is relatively new to the flooring industry though. It is made from the regenerating bark of the cork oak tree, and its harvesting supports communities in the Mediterranean Basin. It also protects an estimated 135 plant and animal species that are found within only one square meter of the cork oak landscape. (Next time you hesistate to grab that bottle of wine, just remember that your purchase - as long as it has a natural and not synethetic cork - is helping plant, animal and human populations in the Med.)

If you have the dough to spend, Sustainable Flooring offers the most ecofriendly of all wood flooring options -- reclaimed wood, which is recovered from old factory buildings, barns, warehouses, and other structures that are no longer used. The company also has a patented Showercork mosaic tile product, made from clean, post-industrial wine cork material specifically for use in wet environments.

Cork and bamboo just don't appeal to you? Don't despair, you can still be green by using other sustainable woods offered by Sustainable Flooring. These woods are "Forestry Stewardship Council certified, harvested in a similar or identical fashion, or either rapidly renewable or come from weed species sources."

Beyond offering sustainable flooring options, the company proves its commitment to being green by fully supporting LEED standards, using the "lowest formaldehyde in the industry" for its glue. Bonus: they have a warehouse right here in Denver (as well as on both coasts) to keep your carbon footprint as small as possible when investing in your wood floors.

How do I know they are the best? Nearly a year ago, my husband and I decided to build some equity into our home with beautiful wood floors. With both environmentally friendliness and cost in mind, we sought out the best flooring provider we could find. For all the above reasons, Sustainable Flooring was our choice.

Having two large dogs, we selected Strandwoven bamboo, which is claimed to be the hardest wood flooring product on the market because of its manufacturing process. At $4.25/square foot, it was more expensive than other bamboo we had seen (as low as $2/square foot), but the price was comparable to other common woods. It turned out that the extra expense was well worth it. Our flooring installer -- who after the job admitted that he hated working with bamboo because people would buy cheap stuff that would chip and flake apart -- said it was great to install and was especially impressed with the way it  looked when finished. And a year later, our floors still look as good.

DISCLAIMER: I have no idea if it's still $4.25/ square foot.

ANOTHER DISCLAIMER: The most ecofriendly thing to do would be to keep your existing flooring. I was unable to find a place to recycle my gnarly carpet and carpet pads that we pulled up and I still feel guily about it.