At last week's Tuesday meeting, we heard Denny's somewhat depressing report about his search to find a place to recycle old carpeting. First, he could not find anyone who was willing to recycle his carpeting, and then, after doing a bit of research, he found out that carpeting that goes to landfills takes approximately 20,000 years to decompose! I would say that poses a problem - most of us will replace carpeting at least a couple of times in our lifetimes.
Tom and I were at that point this fall. We own a group of 6 condominiums in Longboat Key, Florida, and the carpets in the bedrooms were stained beyond repair and needed to be replaced. The problem for us was the fact that we have never had luck with carpets in rental units - they are stained within months of installation, and within 5 years or so they need to be replaced. We really didn't want to put more carpeting in, knowing that it would have to be replaced within a short period of time. So what to do? Most people like carpeting in their bedrooms.
We decided to follow the example of the IHM Motherhouse in Monroe and go with cork flooring. We knew, after walking on the floors at the Motherhouse, that cork was soft on the feet and quite beautiful, in addition to coming from a sustainable source [cork is considered a rapidly renewable product]. So the flooring was recently installed and the results are beyond our expectations! We love the look, the feel is soft on the feet, there is no echo-factor in the room. We didn't even feel the need to add scatter rugs. We have to see how they will wear, but for now we are quite pleased. By the way, we bought our flooring online at floormall.com, and the type we purchased was Valencia.
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