Dwell Magazine Step Lightly story by Amara Holstein / photos by Hunter Freeman September 2006, p. 94

There's trouble underfoot when you're building a green home without considering the flooring. Take stock of these sustainable wood options that let you tread lightly on the land.

It's a familiar scenario. You're standing in the check-out line at the supermarket watching your goods trundle down the belt toward the cash register when suddenly the checkout clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?" and you're stuck. Do you contribute to worldwide deforestation by choosing paper, or do you select plastic and resign yourself to living on landfill?

For homeowners trying to be green while yearning for the natural look and feel of wood on their floors, the issues become ever more amplified. After all, if you're depleting the canopy by using only one paper bag, imagine the implications of 2,000 square feet of wood flooring. That's a lot of leafy trees.

There's no reason, however, to hang your head in shame when selecting a wood floor, as architect Eric Corey Freed, an expert in sustainability, gently chides. "Guilt is no way to approach environmentalism. You shouldn't feel guilty. What you should do is question where the wood for your floor comes from."

No one wants their lovely new floor to be the cause of a rare parrot or toad's extinction, so it's nice to know there's a whole spate of tree-friendly products on the market. "A lot of the woods are now rapidly renewable, meaning they're either sustainably grown and harvested, or they're like bamboo-a grass that can be cut and continues to grow, as much as three feet a day," Freed explains.

In addition to the different varieties of wood, there are also different kinds of flooring options, from engineered wood (where thin strips of wood are lain over each other in alternating directions the compressed) to reclaimed wood to wood laminate (plywood with a photo of wood adhered on top)-all of which have diverse levels of green credibility.

Whatever you do, however, once your sustainable solution is installed underfoot, don't forget to apply an earth-friendly product to its surface. "The worst thing is to have a green floor and then put some nasty oil-based toxic lacquer on it," Freed warns. And feel free to toss your chemical cleaners; all you really need are water, white vinegar and a mop.

Reclaimed Wood by TerraMai
$12.50-$13.50 per sq. ft
Salvaged from buildings, plantations, mines and railroads. Stock is sold as mixes of wood sorted by color, such as Cinnamon Mix (composed of merbau, alan batu, and other species from mine shoring timbers in Southeast Asia.)

Expert Opinion: Reclaimed wood is great, because now you can get old-growth wood that you couldn’t get before. Is actually recycled wood: They take it off the train trestle, the barn, whatever, and mill it into flooring. I like the nail holes and little dings—it adds character. I also like that they’re somewhat seasonal—it’s akin to buying a melon. Sometimes there’s a lot of it, and sometimes there’s not. I find it charming that they don’t always offer the same things.

What We Think: The patina of age wears well on wood, and these strips let you have centuries-old teak or rosewood without the stigma of arboreal irresponsibility. Unlike their thinner-skinned engineered wood counter parts, this flooring can be refinished as many times as you fancy without fear of sanding through the top layer.

Neapolitan Bamboo Plywood By Smith & Fong
$11.l33 per sq. ft
Strengths of different lengths and widths of bamboo glued to a solid core of plywood with natural adhesive. Bamboo is from managed forests in China

Expert Opinion: Bamboo is a very hard wood. Unlike pine floors, it's so hard that the installers complain when they're cutting it because pushing the saw tires them out. They're usually pretty whiney about cutting bamboo. Since this is an engineered wood, it's even more durable than solid bamboo. I've seen bamboo so much that I'm sick of it-it's a little too trendy. But the strips have been fired differently here, which I think is gorgeous. I would use it everywhere. This is my favorite of all the choices because it's the most unusual.

What We Think: You can't beat the sustainable claim of using what's essentially a very attractive weed for your floors. Although we wish it didn't have to travel halfway across the world on an oil-chugging boat in order to be installed stateside.

Engineered Flooring by EcoTimber
$5-$12 per sq. ft
A layer of hardwood bonded to two wood sublayers. More than 15 choices of wood available, including Australian chestnut, White tiger wood and Chocolate oak.

Expert Opinion: EcoTimber has been diligent in where their wood comes from. But it's not in the nature of this company to be avant-garde. They're positioning themselves to say, Look we make very pretty wood, buy our pretty woods that also happen to be sustainable. Its very traditional tongue and groove flooring that's made out of standard woods. And I think that's fine.

What We Think: These aren't the most unusual or exciting options, but overall these are excellent, attractive coverings that get the job done-and do it sustainably. Good solid workhorses of a green floor.

Global Passage Collection by Pergo
$3.77 per sq ft
Photograph of wood grain laminated onto particleboard. Nine choices available, including Indian tiger wood, Brazilian cherry and African Padauk

Expert Opinion: It's not wood, its sawdust, a wood by-product. Its small pieces of wood put together with toxic glues. They could change that-they could use nontoxic glue. It not only off-gasses toxic chemicals, but when you're done with it, it ends up in the landfill. You can't separate the wood-grain photo and the wood. It is incredibly durable though, which is a valid environmental quality. And that's their marketing: It's indestructible. It's the cockroach of wood flooring. It's also unfortunately become the baseline for wood flooring because it's so cheap. If you like the look of wood but don't want to pay very much, then Pergo's your man.

What We Think: Were incredibly disturbed by the idea that a photo of wood, instead of the real thing, should suffice. And we'd prefer that our floors not gas us as we sleep. But ultimately, its Pergo's vast potential of sustainability untapped that turns us off.

Cork Mosaic Tiles by Habitus
$15-$20 per sq. ft
Two circle sizes. Available in natural or more than 100 custom colors. Made from the waste of the cork bottle-stop industry.

Expert Opinion: Cork is the bark of a cork tree. It's considered a rapidly renewable material because it grows back in seven years. For the most part, cork comes in either tiles or sheets. But these are wicked little circles, so you can take a very traditional material and use it in a modern way. We have cork in our kitchen, and when we drop a glass, it bounces instead of breaking. That means it's also good on your back, since it's a soft, resilient, cushiony floor.

What We Think: Frank Lloyd Wright often used cork in his kitchens, and if it's good enough for Fallingwater, it's good enough for us. A springy floor would be most welcome while washing dishes and the fact that cork maintains an even 70 degrees year-round is a cool-weather bonus.

Sustainably Harvested Woods by Plexwood
From $12.95 per sq. ft
Wood laminated in vertical strips adhered with natural glues. Available in birch, beech, pine, ocoume`, meranti, poplar, or deal wood.

Expert Opinion: You get this very modern, tight, clean striping pattern that's fairly consistent, as opposed to the bamboo plywood, which is very much a random pattern. This almost looks the floor of the new MoMa in how striated it is. The cool thing about Plexwood is they'll mill it anything you want. So you could make it into stair treads, cabinetry, and flooring. It's a European company, so they have even higher green standards to contend with than we do.

What We Think: Were taken with the shimmering shades of this product, available in more than 400 eye-pleasing possibilities. But our pocketbook is feeling the pinch of the current exchange rate, and purchasing our floor in Euros and shipping it over from the Netherlands would be quite pricey.