How to Choose Eco-Friendly Tiles

How to Choose Eco-Friendly Tiles and Mosaics

Creating a home is exciting and comes with the opportunity to customize your space accordingly. While this is fun, it often requires some research as well. If you’re trying to be more eco-friendly, you might want to know how to choose environmentally conscious materials for your home. Luckily, we have your kitchen and bathroom tiles covered with our collection of eco-conscious tile and mosaics.

The best option is to reuse what already exists. Since you’re reading this article, it seems like you’ve already decided that it’s time to upgrade. Here are some greener choices that you can make for your kitchen and bathroom floor and mosaic tiles.

Choose Tiles that have Recycled Content

Tiles can be made out of many different materials. Typically, they are made out of glass, marble, porcelain, or ceramic. Some materials can actually be upcycled and incorporated into tile and mosaics.

There are two types of recycled materials: pre-consumer content and post-consumer content.

Pre-consumer content is created during the manufacturing process. Examples of materials would be sawdust, excess cement, and other materials that would typically go to landfills. Sometimes factories can reuse this content when making a tile. Our Bowery series, Astoria series, and Rocky series all contain pre-consumer recycled materials.

Post-consumer content is created from recycled materials like plastic, aluminum, glass, and paper made from everyday people. Some of those materials, like glass, can be incorporated into glass mosaics.

Choose Tiles with Low VOCs & Less Off-Gassing

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are chemical compounds found in furniture, flooring, and other building materials that are released at normal indoor temperatures. These VOCs will usually evaporate over time, but they have been generally unregulated until recently. Because people spend on average 90% of their time indoors, considering materials with low VOC emittance has become an important component of green building and interior design.

One way that you can tell if a product has low VOCs is the GREENGUARD Certification label. This label represents that a third-party tested and verified the product has low chemical emissions. They will also list the product in the Spot UL database so that you can double-check the product has been labeled correctly. Our Penthouse series is GREENGUARD Gold Certified.

Choose Durable Tiles

Another way that you can ensure you’re buying in an eco-friendly way is to make sure that the products are durable and suitable for its intended use. We list information about each product like material and PEI rating. These will help you determine where the product can be used.

Generally, we recommend that customers use porcelain for kitchen and bathroom floor tiles and mosaics. We also suggest choosing a tile or mosaic that has a PEI rating of at least 3. Even then, you’ll want to consider how much foot traffic will be in the intended area. For high-use residential areas, try using a PEI 4 or PEI 5 porcelain tile to ensure a long life-span of the product.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to incorporate more eco-friendly flooring into your home, hopefully you have a better understanding now. There are several ways that you can choose a greener floor. Remember to look for tiles with recycled content, GREENGUARD Certification, and material/PEI rating appropriate for the intended use.