Eco Design

This post is a how-to  upgrade a room in your house whether it be paint or flooring with new eco-friendly products to use. It's amazing the amount of progress in the green trend and how it has spread to many spectrums of products we use in our daily lives.

Fabic
The eco-friendly fabics are the most naturally produced items like hemp or wool. The downsize of this materials is price, they tend to be more expensive then the synthetic fabics yet don't contain petrochemicals which take longer to biodegrade and can at times cause harm to skin. Some other eco-friendly fabics organic/recycled cotton, recycled polyester, bamboo,soybean, and silk. Also recycle and reuse fabics for quilts or cloths . Give new life to old pieces!

http://www.ecofabric.ca/

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/ecotip_mini_dir.php


Paint
Now more and more stores are offering eco-friendly paints for consumers. Eco-friendly paints are water-based paints that do not contain VOCs (volatile organic compunds) which emit gases. Also if your not interested in water-based paints there are paints that have low VOC levels. Futhermore, the eco-friendly  paints come for indoor and outdoors areas.

Some Sources:

http://www.greenpaint.ca/

http://www.recyclepaint.com/

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/bmpsweb/portals/bmps.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=fh_mm_hiddenPage&np=public_site%2Fapplications%2Fmultimedia%2Fnatura

http://www.rona.ca/content/september-15-2009--rona-launches-new-eco-paint-line-across-canada_2009_press-releases_investor-relations


Flooring

Hard Wood Options
- have flooring created from reuseable items like leather flooring in which they take the scraps that would go into the garbage and make a floor.
- get engineered hardwood  which means the product is thinner equaling less wood  and in some cases are made of recycled high density fibre
- consider the type of wood you are purchasing for instance bamboo is an alternative to hardwood and has a faster growth and repenish rate of 8-10 years verses most hardwood take 80-100 years.

http://www.styleathome.com/Decorating-and-Design/Flooring/a/1117

http://www.eco-friendly-digest.com/eco-friendly-flooring.html

Carpets
- purchase a carpet made out of recycled pop bottles
-purchase a carpet that can be recycled
- look at material with in the carpet and go for more natural produce products like wool

Lighting
Switch from the old and true incandescent light bulbs that have shorter life spans, waste energy and cost depleting . Some alternative to incandescent are LED (light-emitting diode), fluorescent and halogen which will save money and energy!!