Today’s natural interior design aesthetic includes many flooring products, from natural-fiber rugs to luxury vinyl tile. For this customer, natural means chemical-free wool.
Elena Page, M.D., knew what she would do when it was time to replace her carpet. An occupational and environmental medicine physician in Cincinnati, OH., Page has a lot of experience in how chemicals can affect indoor-air quality.
All carpets from major manufacturers these days have
CRI Green Label Plus Indoor-Air Quality certification, ensuring that the products meet safety limits for Volatile Organic Compound (VOC ) emissions set by the state of California. But that wasn’t enough for Page.
“I wanted to be sure that whatever I put in my home was not an emitter of VOCs,” she says. “I also care very much about what the workers are exposed to in making the carpet, and synthetic carpets expose them to a variety of harmful substances, some of which are carcinogens.”
When a consumer is intent on finding a specific product and spends hours researching it, she might be more knowledgeable than the salesperson when she gets to the store.
Jennifer Lutz recalls how frustrated she was when she went to a mainstream flooring store, asking about natural carpet and hard-surface flooring that had third-party indoor-air quality certification. This drove her back to the computer and her Google searches, which put her in contact with Natural Interiors.®
“I didn’t feel like the salespeople at the store knew what they were talking about or even understood my questions in regard to certifications and VOCs,” says Lutz of Lebanon, OH. “It is very important to me, and I do not want to spend money to buy a product that does not meet my standards.”
If you are looking for a new hardwood floor in today’s popular, wider widths, you most likely have seen engineered flooring.
Unlike solid hardwood flooring, an engineered floor is put together in layers, using adhesives. And when the healthy-home movement began more than a decade ago, these products were a no-no.
But with today’s No Added Urea Formaldehyde (NAUF) adhesives, used by many leading manufacturers, concerns about unhealthful chemical emissions are diminishing. And because engineered products use the premium wood species only on the product’s surface, planet-friendly product seekers can make a stronger case for engineered hardwood. 
