One of the biggest trends lately has become making your home as eco-friendly as possible. People are thinking more and more about their environment and there has been a large shift towards sustainable homes. Recycling, reusing biodegradable materials and doing everything that is in our power to avoid hazardous substances that negatively affect our environment has become an integral part of our awareness.
This even includes our approaches to designing the interior of our homes. Particularly, there has been a large effort in terms of creating green kitchens. The great thing about eco-friendly home design is that it’s both sensible, practical, and modern.
So, which materials should you consider when remodeling your kitchen?
Keep the “3 R’s” philosophy in mind
For starters, when basing your design on eco-friendly principles, one must think about the so-called “philosophy of 3 R’s”. The three essential practices are: reduce, recycle, and reuse. This means more than just implementing natural elements into your décor. You should, in fact, use the most eco-friendly materials for your furniture. This includes those that are made of raw materials.
You need to do your research on every manufacturer that you intend to purchase from. Make sure that what they offer is 100% recycled and recyclable. This way you will have a kitchen that is truly friendly to your environment.
Use cork for your floors
Instead of going for a hardwood or linoleum floor, you should choose cork. It is both a more cost-effective solution as well as an eco-friendly one. Installing is quite simple. All that you need to do is attach it to the surface underneath with glue. After that, it gets an acrylic coating which makes sure that it’s both waterproof and not slippery.
Cork has a very smooth texture, and when you step on it, it adapts to your body’s weight. This makes it a great solution for making your kitchen the kind of space where kids can roam freely as well, because when they fall, the cork will make sure that it’s painless.
Incorporate Plexiglas
Believe it or not, but according to a variety of professionals, such as those at Plastic Wholesale, Plexiglas is actually a great eco-friendly material for your kitchen as well. It is usually used to cover kitchen tiles and make them completely waterproof. You will not have to worry about mildew or mold ever again. Furthermore, you can apply this solution to almost any other kitchen element as well.
A lot of people who are aiming for eco-friendly solutions are automatically turned away when they hear about plastic as a material. However, Plexiglas and a whole variety of plastics, referred to as eco-plastics, are just what the name suggests.
Create sustainable worktops
Your kitchen’s worktops are one of the primary things that you need to think about when designing an eco-friendly environment. You can find a wide variety of options, made out of materials that are at least 50% recycled, such as glass, vitreous ash, porcelain, and the like. The idea is to decrease the emission of hazardous gases and make use of materials that are as natural as possible.
Again, this kind of solution is both an eco-friendly and a stylish one. You have the option to choose the style of your kitchen according to your desire, be it classic, traditional, or rustic.
In Summation
Remodeling your kitchen into an eco-friendly environment isn’t actually all that hard to do. What you require is knowledge of the kind of materials that are highly-sustainable, and how to properly implement them into your design in order to come up with a truly beautiful and stylish solution. “Going green” is a choice that everyone today can decide to make.