Cork Flooring Beauty – Environmentally-Friendly Too!
Growing Popularity
That wood flooring is gaining popularity is well known. When home owners see just
how beautiful and inexpensive a natural wood floor is they are keen to
get it installed in their own home. Hardwood flooring is the first
choice for most when they are looking at installing a wooden floor in
their home, Oak and Cherry because of the variety of colors
and shades are two popular choices, sometimes a more exotic hardwood like
Bamboo is the hardwood of choice. But one environmentally
friendly choice is also available and that is cork. Cork has
been around for centuries and used for floors for a very long time and
for a number of reasons,among those reasons is the fact that it is a very long lasting product and
that it comes from a renewable resource.
Source
Cork is harvested from the bark of cork trees, which are a variety of Oak
The cork is gathered through stripping off the bark on the outside of the trunk,
this regenerates in about six years ready for harvesting again.
This means that rather than cutting down a tree just once for material,
cork farms can strip the bark away again and again; there are still
trees being used in bark harvesting that are around 200 years old! For
for those of us who care about the environment, this makes cork
flooring an ideal material, since it comes from a renewable resource. Even for
those who have not considered the source of the material, cork flooring
is a wonderful alternative for hardwood floors.
Durability
Often when we think of cork, we think of the soft material used in cork
boards but in reality Cork is one of the strongest materials used. Not
only is it scuff resistant, it is elastic and hard to damage under
normal circumstances, but it also resists water penetration, unlike
other hardwood floors, so it is ideal for bathrooms and kitchens, for
this reason too, it is used as stoppers in wine bottles. Because of the
hard wearing qualities of Cork, there are flooring
installations that have lasted for over 100 years. It is also one of
the floorings of choice used in the United States Library of Congress.
Cork has excellent insulating properties, so good in fact that it can
help reduce heating or cooling costs. This makes it a very good
flooring material for basement floors for example. Cork
flooring is a good sound insulator too, a fact well known in the
building industry for years and useful for home owners in reducing
noise transfer from floor to floor.
Aesthetics
Cork flooring has a mottled appearance that we are all familiar with and
which makes it different from all of the other wood floors. It comes in
a variety of patterns and colors that you can select from to match your
own particular decorating style. Because of it’s elastic nature Cork
flooring is comfortable and quiet to walk on. – ideal for apartment
dwellers.
Health Concerns.
Cork flooring is much more than just an environmentally friendly material,
it is a naturally hypo-allergenic substance which does not
support the growth of mold or mildew , it does not
produce toxins or shed any fibres and it is antistatic. All of these
properties are good news for those people who suffer from allergies