(By WoodYouLike)
When choosing for natural wooden flooring you will start to enjoy the many benefits and advantages this floor covering gives you from day one on:
1. easy day-to-day care and maintenance with the knowledge that a clean wooden floor is really clean and doesn’t hide house dust mites etc
2. a ‘solid’ investment that keeps its value over years to come and is a quality feature to promote when the time might come you start thinking of selling your home
3. one of the most anti-allergic floor coverings you can have, a real benefit for Asthma, allergy and even eczema sufferers
4. eco-friendly, for every tree used in wooden flooring from sustained forests new trees are planted and trees are nature’s way of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing the oxygen we breathe
In fact it’s very simple: dirty is dirty, clean is clean.
Because natural wooden flooring is a hard floor covering, dirt, dust will stay on top of it and will never penetrate the material (as happens with carpets). House mites have nothing to ‘cling’ on to.
All it takes is a soft broom (or cylinder vacuum cleaner, we recommend the brand Miele – N.B upright cleaners with plastic wheels can easily scratch the floor) for the normal day-to-day care.
Plus, taking care of your wooden floor enhances its beauty, durability and value. 
ICI Woodcare reports that adding/restoring natural wooden features in your home can increase the value of it. Wooden features include (stripped) wooden doors, door and window frames, wooden banisters on stair and landing, real wooden kitchen cupboards (or only cupboard doors) and of course installing Natural Wooden Flooring in the main areas.
When deciding on Natural Wooden Flooring it’s best to keep the most popular floor in mind, especially when you want to climb the ‘property-ladder’. 
The most popular wood-type is still Oak and the grade mostly sold (in the UK) is Rustic. A Rustic Oak floor added to your home sells it better than for instance a tropical wood-type. Even if you would choose a specific coloured Oak floor (like Smoked, White-washed, Antique stained or Castle Grey oiled), the new owner can change this more easily to his/her own liking than trying to change a dark tropical floor into a lighter coloured one.
Most customers (in the U.K. that is) find a premium or prime grade Oak floor looks too ‘neat’ and resembles a Melamine (Plastic) Laminate floor too much.
And an oil/wax finish is slowly gaining in popularity, matte replacing the gloss and shiny look.
House dust is the major cause of allergy in people with yearlong runny or blocked nose and/or sneezing. In addition to these allergic reactions, dust can trigger and irritate asthma and eczema.
Allergies are the result of an overactive and over-performing immune system. There are many different types of allergies. Some allergies are genetic. If one of more parent suffers with eczema, asthma or allergies, it is more likely that any children will suffer one or more of these too.
Some allergies are contact related and in order to have an allergic reaction you need to have had contact with the allergen. Eczema, asthma and hay fever (allergic rhinitis) are all considered forms of allergy.
Almost all asthma in young people is allergic asthma. This means having inherited genes which makes it possible to get asthma; plus allergy-producing things in the environment, such as house dust mites, cats, or dogs; as ‘trigger’ factors.
A speck of dust may contain fabric fibres, human skin, bacteria, animal danders, pollen, grains, moulds spores, food particles, mites and mites-droppings. Mites cannot be seen without a microscope. They thrive in warm and humid conditions. Because they feed on skin scales, they love bedding, carpets, upholstered furniture, clothing, closets and car seats. They usually survive ordinary vacuuming because they burrow deep and are equipped with sucking pads on their feet.
Rigorous vacuuming every day can help to reduce the amount of mites; I don’t know about you, but personally I find every vacuum cleaner ‘smells’ of dust, no matter how many times you empty the dust bag (one of the most tedious and dusty tasks around!) or change the filter. We use a soft-broom for day-to-day cleaning of our wooden floor covering, but that’s a hard task on carpets we’re afraid.
Carpets - they provide a breeding ground for mites. One square meter of carpet can contain up to 100.000 dust mites.
However, the cheapest alternative smooth floorings are made of PVC, also known as vinyl, which is a major source of toxic and sometimes persistent substances in the environment. Some research also suggest the softeners in PVC itself may contribute to asthma incidence.
The positive effect on your health by replacing carpets with wooden flooring doesn’t take long to occur as one of our customers wrote us:
“You may also wish to know that my sinuses and allergies have been greatly reduced since the removal of carpet and the fitting of a beautiful wood floor”
Wood is not only beautiful varied in all kind of products; as trees - forests - wood is a beautiful natural recreation source. Most importantly is the fact that forests act as a giant carbon sink.
CO2 and Climate Change
According to the International Panel on Climate Change, the 20th century was the warmest century since records began, with the ‘90s the warmest decade and every year we’re adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
The Government is now urgently looking to reduce CO2 emissions without compromising on economical growth. Right now the wood industry has a unique opportunity to take advantage of this commitment.
The timber industry is able to offer positive contribution to the challenge of sustainable development and the reduction of greenhouse gas emission, and is more and more actively engaged with the building industry in putting new, environmentally friendly solutions into practice.
The best way to grow our forests is to use them!
Trees are nature’s way of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing the oxygen we breathe. Planting trees can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and using wood products can help slow the growth of Global Warming.
The more wood we use, the more our forests grow: thanks to sustainable forest management more trees are planted than are harvested - every year European forests grow by an area the size of Cyprus!
The more the forests grow, the more carbon dioxide is sucked out of the atmosphere, the more oxygen is produced and the more wood is available to use; the more wood is used, the more trees are planted, the more the forests grow, the more…......
Using wood instead of less environmentally-friendly materials makes sure the carbon sink effect of the forests is put to good use, rather than being lost through natural death and decay (when forests are left to their own devices this will cause CO2 emission from the stored carbon).
Besides that, have you ever calculated the real environmental costs of producing steel, concrete, aluminium or PVC-U (energy used, CO2 produced, water used and toxins released)?
Forests: a great factory and a free leisure resource
Modern forests, skilfully managed, contain trees of different ages, different species alongside the primary production species. Open spaces in the form of rides, firebreaks and streamside reserves are designed into the forest and, as it is thinned, increasing numbers of under-storey species become established.
While producing timber, these man-made forests also produce picnic spots, lakes and nature trails. Thousands of species of birds, animals and plants call them home. Their air is clean and good to breathe.
The public has free access to 94% of forestland in Europe.
Using tropical wood also helps in the fight against tropical deforestation, as long as the wood comes from well-managed sources. However, if there were no markets for wood, forests would be cleared to grow other cash crops. For these societies, often desperate for income, a forest that pays is a forest that stays.
The tropical Duoplank Wood-Engineered floors come from FSC certified forests.
Every time you use wood you are helping to make sure the forests will keep growing. So your children and your children’s children will be able to enjoy visiting forests for years and years to come.
(The market for forest products helps finance sustainable forest management.)
