Z.Z.Daily Construction

Bamboo flooring is becoming an increasingly popular choice with homeowners. Flooring upgrades are one of the most popular home remodeling improvements, and hardwood floors have been a first choice for many.

Hardwood floors provide a luxurious and beautiful improvement for your home. They can also be expensive, and with the growing interest and concern about sustainable and renewable building materials, many have turned to the fake laminate flooring products.

But there may be another choice to consider …

Bamboo flooring may be an ideal alternative hardwood flooring solution for you. Bamboo is an eco-friendly, totally renewable material. A member of the grass family, bamboos are the fastest growing woody plants in the world. While it may take over 100 years to replace a hardwood tree such as a Brazilian teak, bamboo reaches full maturity suitable for hardwood applications in about 4 years, and can actually regenerate without replacing or replanting (remember, bamboo is a grass).

Typically, bamboo flooring products have had durability issues. Generally softer than the hardwood flooring materials, bamboo floors have a reputation of being prone to dents, nicks and scratches. But this “softness” legacy may be more an issue in the past. New manufacturing techniques have improved and some of the better bamboo flooring products available today are actually quite durable and sturdy.

Consumer reports has tested bamboo flooring products in the past and found the same typical issues with durability. However, for the first time in a recent test, consumer reports has found the best bamboo flooring products actually out-performed the top selling oak.  See the following video. (more…)

We see more green remodeling ideas everyday, particularly in the area of earth-friendly building materials. We found another company in a similar category to Serious Materials, the maker of EcoRock – a new alternative drywall solution, that we brought to your attention recently.

Cleanboard, a San Francisco based drywall startup, is a new company with a slightly different twist on a drywall product manufactured using a more environmentally friendly process. Cleanboard promotes their ecology friendly drywall product as “the most environmentally friendly drywall on earth“.

CleanBoard has created a solar powered system that uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a heat collector which heats a transfer fluid to store the sun’s radiant energy. The heated transfer fluid heats the drywall baking ovens up to 200 degrees Celsius. And the transfer fluid can store the heat in pressurized chambers up to 24 hours enabling the company to manufacture drywall even on days when the sun isn’t shining.

The traditional gypsum drywall manufacturing process typically relies on fuel expensive gas fired ovens that represent a significant carbon footprint. Moving to a solar based technology to heat the ovens provides a carbon free solution and should reduce the energy costs to manufacture the drywall by more than 50%.

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We hear a lot about eco-friendly green remodeling lately. As the sustainable building trend picks up momentum, many companies and manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon and bringing new and improved green building material products to market.

One such company, Serious Materials, has released a new drywall product they call EcoRock. The company claims this is the first significant change in the way that sheetrock is manufactured in over 100 years, and has recently won the Popular Science GreenTech award for best of what’s new in ‘08.

For environmentally conscious home builders and home remodelers that are looking for better sustainable building materials solutions, EcoRock may be an interesting advancement worth looking into.

EcoRock improves on traditional gypsum sheetrock in several ways.

• Uses 80% less energy to manufacture than gypsum drywall.  Traditional gypsum wallboard manufacturing processes uses energy intensive drying ovens to fabricate drywall. EcoRock is naturally dried and cured using an oven-free process that consumes much less energy to manufacturer.
• Made of 80% recycled materials - made using recycled industrial waste products including waste from steel and cement plants. No gypsum is used to manufacture EcoRock.
• Mold and Termite resistant – outperforms all other mold resistant drywall as much as 50%. And no harsh anti-fungal chemicals are used to make EcoRock.
• Can be fully recycled at end of life – can be used as a pH additive for soils and can be returned to the production of EcoRock and other building materials as a useful raw material. And unlike gypsum drywall materials, EcoRock can be safely disposed of in landfills if necessary.

According to the manufacturer, EcoRock should be available from building material suppliers in the Western states later in 2009. The manufacturer indicates there is no difference in hanging, taping and installing EcoRock over standard drywall products.  The cost for the new drywall building material is not currently published, but expect it to be higher priced than gypsum based wallboard.