Monthly Archives: January 2011

One of the biggest environmental benefits wood floors offer is that they are made from a renewable resource – trees. In fact, in the United States, the standing volume of hardwood trees is actually increasing from year to year. The USDA Forest Service reports that for every tree harvested, 1.9 are planted in its place, which means that the raw materials needed to make wood floors will be available for many generations to come.
The wood flooring industry also works to get the most use out of each log it harvests. Engineered wood floors are made with real wood using a cross-ply construction process that allows for more wood to be used from each log. The lower, or core layers, of each flooring board can use wood that might otherwise not have been useful in a solid wood flooring board, which is one solid piece of wood from top to bottom. By contrast, engineered wood, while being all wood, is not solid. It contains several layers of wood stacked on top of one another in a cross-ply fashion to increase wood yield and reduce wood waste. This cross-ply construction process increases the dimensional stability of the wood, which makes it useful in places that previously were not recommended for wood floors, like bathrooms or basements.
The National Wood Flooring Association has a consumer web site available that provides a great deal of information about wood floors, including the differences between solid and engineered products. For more information, visit www.woodfloors.org.
The National Wood Flooring Association is a non-profit trade organization, with more than 3,200 members world-wide, dedicated to educating consumers, architects, designers, specifiers and builders in the uses and benefits of wood flooring. NWFA members receive the best in educational training, benefits, technical resources and networking, to advance their professionalism and success. The NWFA is located at 111 Chesterfield Industrial Boulevard, Chesterfield, MO 63005, and can be contacted at 800-422-4556 (USA & Canada), 636-519-9663 (local and international), or on-line at www.nwfa.org.