Bamboo Flooring: Sustainable Alternative Flooring

If you are renovating the apartment or are about to finish the work in your new home you will have noticed that one of the most difficult choices to face is that of the floor. The magazines are full of examples but, we are sure, you prefer the atmosphere that parquet can give. Do you know that there is bamboo flooring as a sustainable alternative to parquet without giving up the typical characteristics of wood?

Why a sustainable alternative?

Bamboo is a 100% natural product, it is a spontaneous grass plant, and it is not a tree (no wild deforestation is therefore carried out), the market price is more competitive than that of wooden parquet. If you love nature and want to respect it, choosing the bamboo flooring is the best you can do. The use of bamboo also allows you to have sustainable, long-lasting, elegant and beautiful to look at floors. The vast choice of possible formats allows you to achieve the desired effect.

Bamboo parquet: discover what the market offers.

The bamboo parquet market offers several alternatives that allow you to satisfy the different tastes and needs of those who choose this material to give a unique touch to their home.

The alternatives you can choose from are:

• Classic

• Hand planed

• Strand Woven

• For underfloor heating

• For outdoors.

The classic bamboo parquet

The classic bamboo parquet is distinguished on the basis of the color, structure, and type of paint used. Usually, the bamboo has a very light color and to become dark it is treated with a process that, in technical jargon, is called carbonized: the sugars inside the bamboo change color due to the action of the steam.

Hand-planed bamboo flooring

The variant of hand-planed bamboo flooring is very similar to the horizontal version of classic bamboo parquet. The element that makes it different is the planing of the upper part of the strips: this type of processing can in fact only be carried out when choosing the horizontal type of bamboo parquet. The hand-planed parquet can also have a light or dark shade.

Strand Woven bamboo flooring

Strand Woven parquet is made up of many continuous strands of bamboo that are made from ground bamboo. Once the bamboo has been cut into strips of different sizes, and after removing the larger pieces that are destined for the production of the classic variant, the remaining threads are cooked using the same liquid used in the treatment to remove sugars and insects.

The bamboo parquet for underfloor heating.

If you've decided to do underfloor heating but you're not sure that bamboo flooring is possible, you can stop worrying because neither option excludes the other. From the technological point of view, however, the only variant you can choose is the horizontal type: while the classic bamboo flooring is 15mm thick and are heat insulating, the bamboo flooring used for floor heating has a thickness of 10mm, favoring in this way the diffusion of heat.

Outdoor bamboo flooring

Here we are at the last type of bamboo flooring, the outdoor one. In this case, the variant at your disposal is the strand woven bamboo, the same that we saw before only that the one destined to the outside is treated with a particular oil that makes it smooth and resistant to the action of the atmospheric agents such as water and sun.

The highest cost is required for high-density bamboo. In its high-density variant, the bamboo strips are subjected to different processes up to the maximum compression of the bamboo vegetable fibers. The fibers, so compressed and compacted, allow the final product to reach the highest possible durability class. The high-density bamboo offers durability, stability, hardness, resistance, etc. can also be suitable for installation of wall coverings of the bath or for parquet flooring in the bathroom and other areas subject to moisture.

The versatility of bamboo flooring is such that there are no limits of use. Bamboo is timidly spreading for floor coverings, ceilings, and walls.