Flooring is an essential industry and always has been. After all, any building needs a surface where people can stand and walk and where furniture may be placed. Today’s American flooring industry is a robust one and may even see some further growth in the near future. If floors are not made from sheer concrete such as in basement, then they are made from wooden planks. Most typically, American houses and some public buildings make use of hardwood planks from native hardwoods such as oak and cherry. However, these hardwoods are not very sustainable, and many Americans are concerned about the great pressure this industry puts on hardwood forests on the North American continent. Hardwood trees take some 20 years to mature and the entire tree is lost when logged. As an alternative, flooring made from eucalyptus is being introduced to the market, along with bamboo flooring manufacturers. Why might natural bamboo flooring or flooring made from eucalyptus be used today? Such flooring made from eucalyptus can offer a number of advantages for everyone involved.

Flooring

The modern American flooring market most often deals with tiles and hardwood planks, but today’s contractors can also work with flooring made from eucalyptus or different types of bamboo flooring. This large industry is worth many billions of dollars and employs many Americans today, and indirectly supports jobs with hardwood logging and sawing. Many surveyed workers in this industry, such as contractors and retailer and distributors, agree that this market may see 3% growth over the next few years. One in three surveyed experts predicted even more generous growth, closer to 8% in the coming years. Either way, these contractors are flexible enough to work with flooring made from eucalyptus or bamboo wood flooring, and for good reason. These are exotic woods, but they are formed into standard planks in factories around the world and can be used just like hardwood planks. And in some regards, flooring made from eucalyptus may be superior to hardwood. How?

Bamboo and Eucalyptus Flooring

One factor here is preserving the natural environment. “Going green” has become a major initiative around the world in the past 20 years, spanning everything from boosting plastic and paper recycling to lowering electricity needs to installing solar panels and trading car rides for bicycle rides. But going green also means preserving natural ecosystems, including trees. Modern logging for hardwoods is done to sustain the flooring industry, but this may threaten to deplete the North American continent’s hardwood forests in the coming years. But the flooring industry cannot simply cut off its flow of materials, so instead, more sustainable flooring materials are being introduced to replace them. This maintains the flooring market and gives hardwood forests some relief from heavy logging.

Bamboo is a woody grass native to Asia, and once this plant reaches maturity in just three to five years, it may start regrowing its harvested stalks with notorious speed. Bamboo can be harvested repeatedly without killing the plant, and this makes it highly sustainable. The same can be said of eucalyptus wood, and these plants can be harvested and converted into planks in factories. Eucalyptus wood is compressed into floorboards, and bamboo stalks are sliced and shredded into fibers, then pressurized and glued into solid planks. These materials can then be exported, such as to North American flooring contractors and their suppliers.

These materials are not only environmentally friendly, but they are strong competition to hardwood. Hardly anything is being lost by substituting for hardwood planks; in fact, flooring made from eucalyptus is even tougher than hardwood. Its extreme hardness lets it be used in high-traffic areas in the house where regular hardwood would suffer over time from heavy use. Both bamboo and eucalyptus make for attractive flooring that many homeowners may find appealing, and they come in a range of colors. Bamboo can be darkened with carbonization to expand its range of colors, but customers should note that bamboo’s color range is still more limited than hardwood’s. What is more, these sustainable woods are easy for contractors to install, being similar to hardwood, and they cost roughly the same as hardwood per square foot if it’s quality material. Such wood is also easy to mop clean and refinish if it suffers from scratches.