Last Updated on January 7, 2013 by Mike

Wool

One of the all time most expensive floor coverings is wool carpet. Wool is absolutely beautiful, and will certainly last longer than any other types of carpet. If you invest in wool carpet, you’re going to get value for money and it will last much longer than other carpet styles. So your initial outlay of money will prove to win overall in the long-term.
Wool carpet is available in a wide array of colours, it’s insulating, warm and soft and feels and looks great. Carpet manufacturers continue to release beautiful new ranges into the marketplace like Berber and shag wool.

Sisals are a great option, although if you have young kids, sisals are probably not the best option because they’re not really all that soft compared to the Berbers and shag pile wools. Sisals are, however, very durable, easy to maintain and are available in loads on modern and classic designs.

Recycled Carpet

These products are a little intriguing to most consumers. Recycled carpet looks and feels like regular carpet, but it’s actually made from olefin and plastic bottles. One of the major draw cards with recycled carpets is the shear range of available colours meaning that you’re not limited to a basic colour selection.

Cotton

Then you have many other natural flooring and carpet options such as large cotton throw rugs. Rugs are also available in jute, coir and hemp. There are a number of different options that you can use that are environmentally friendly.

Carpet tiles

In general, carpet does not have a great reputation for environmental consciousness. Over the last 14 years, carpet manufacturer powerhouse Interface, has introduced a policy, that by the year 2020, will no longer produce carpet tiles that can cause environmental damage meaning that Interface does things a little differently when it comes to making carpet.

Interface now collects non environmentally friendly scrap carpet and recycles it into good carpet. Up until recently, scrap carpet used to end up as landfill, which would take an estimated 20 thousand years to break down if it were not recycled.

The efforts to win the sustainability challenge is huge, like climbing a mountain, and as we look at ways to eliminate omissions, we can reflect on energy, transportations, material flows and the whole shift in culture which is necessary to reach the end goal.

Interface now uses and adopts new ways of manufacturing such as methane gas, which is powered by landfill as a way to cut back on natural gas usage as well as using other alternative energy sources such as solar energy. Interface claims to have cut its fossil fuel by 45% and thanks to their recycling efforts, have cut landfill usage by a whopping 80%.

Hopefully other leading carpet manufacturers will soon adopt the Interface approach, which will result in a much more environmentally friendly carpet and flooring industry and help save our planet.

Carpets on the Move promotes the usage and manufacturing of environmentally friendly carpet and flooring.