Sustainable from the Bottom Up
Green Material Guide
Building a new home from scratch is a great opportunity to customize your space and bring your design ideas to fruition. But the often overlooked benefit is that you can use green building materials to build a more eco-friendly home. These days we have the advantage of knowing which materials are most environmentally friendly. Read on to make use of them – whether you’re renovating or building from scratch!
Eco-friendly options for building materials are available for almost every element of your home: flooring, walls, insulation, paint, and roofing. New flooring trends have seen the rise of cork, bamboo, and natural fibers. If you do choose wood floors, make sure they certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which encourages the use of ecologically responsible wood. For your walls, new and hot eco-friendly options include fired honeycomb clay, recycled bricks, and even blocks made of recycled materials from power stations! Speaking of hot eco-friendly materials, insulation options are more bountiful now that ever. You can choose from agricultural products made from corn and soybean oil, or even insulation made from mushroom fibers or sheep wool.
When it’s time to make a decision about roofing materials, there are two gold-standard eco-friendly options to choose from. You can install a green “living” roof which consists of vegetation, or a solar roof. The green, living roof is a fairly new innovation, and can be expensive up front, but the solar option has become more affordable in recent years. Whether you install these eco-friendly options in all aspects of your home, or only some, you’ll be making a difference to the size of your home’s carbon footprint!
