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.

Different Types of Bamboo Flooring

Bamboo flooring is typically made by slicing bamboo poles into strips, destarched through a boiling process, glued into boards, and milled. There are basically four different bamboo flooring types:

• Horizontal Grain:  bamboo strips glued on top of one another to form a surface.
• Vertical Grain: bamboo strips glued side-by-side in longer, narrow bands
• Grainless or Stranded: shredded bamboo is pressed together with a binding agent. This method generally produces the most dense and hardest flooring product.
• Engineered: bamboo veneer is applied over a substrate.

With the various bamboo flooring types, some of the binding and gluing processes often use formaldehyde agents. These resins and binding agents are responsible for releasing certain levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

By comparison, bamboo products use far less of these volatile compounds than other materials such as particle board (which is far more prevalent throughout many homes).  Today, you’ll find many more manufacturers sensitive to modern environmental concerns have come up with a greater range of environmentally friendly bamboo products.

EcoTimber Bamboo Flooring, courtesy of hardwoodinstaller.com

You may be surprised by the range of bamboo flooring choices you have.

At the lower range, the prices can be more attractive than the hardwood floor counterparts, but durability and quality may be an issue.

With the higher end bamboo floor products, the pricing is comparable to hardwood floor materials, and the durability has improved considerably. As suggested by recent Consumer Reports testing, bamboo flooring durability can actually surpass some of the hardwood products including oak.

For the most part, bamboo flooring installation is similar to installing hardwood floors. But it’s best to find a flooring installer with bamboo floor experience.

And Remember, try to have your your hardwood floors installed toward the end of a remodeling project to avoid your new floors becoming damaged while other work is completed.

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%.

The solar powered drywall facility will be based in the Mojave Desert where an almost year-round supply of radiant sunshine is available. CleanBoard expects to be in full production able to produce 2 million square feet of drywall in 2010, with projections to expand production to 10 million square feet of drywall in 2011, and the ability to produce a peak volume of 100 million square feet of drywall.

Today’s homeowners are not just interested in remodeling their homes for beauty, comfort and convenience. Improving the energy efficiency in their homes and protecting the environment are becoming increasingly important home improvement considerations as well.

Keeping an eye out for environmentally friendly and energy efficient building materials will help you make the best green remodeling decisions for your next home improvement project.

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.