Tips for Choosing Eco-Friendly Decking Materials

People create a lot of trash and waste a considerable amount of resources, which harms the environment as we deplete its resources and regurgitate them in the form of pollutants. To minimize this, you can take small steps toward greater sustainability in various aspects of your life. One of those is how you approach residential construction. Try these tips for choosing eco-friendly decking materials to augment the options with which you provide clients when building decks.

Consider the Creation Costs

Many of the environmental risks that building materials pose come through their creation process, which may give off chemicals that threaten plants and animals or weaken the atmosphere. Some materials may also be made from natural resources that are being quickly depleted to the point that they won’t be around anymore. You should find a material type that can be made without either of these risks. The manufacturing should be clean, and the components of the materials should be renewable resources that we’ll be able to use well into the future. For example, recyclable plastics or metals can find new life in decking, and they can be recycled again at the end of the deck’s life.

Think About Maintenance

Another tip for choosing eco-friendly decking materials is to pay attention to the maintenance requirements of a material. Once it’s used to create a deck, a material may not have any negative environmental effects in itself, but the maintenance that goes along with it might. Take wood, for example. To keep most wood species in a solid state, you must put chemicals on their surface to fight off moisture, rotting, and insects. Those chemicals can easily transfer from the deck into the ground, where they’re toxic to plants and other organisms.

You should also look at how long a material will last. The more quickly a homeowner must replace a deck or its components, the more material they must use. The manufacturing process may not have many effects on paper, but if the material it creates deteriorates quickly, the potentially dangerous chemical derivatives of the process can add up to a point where it becomes an environmental problem.

If you’re trying to include eco-friendly decking materials in your future projects, contact Tangent Materials. We supply recycled plastic landscape timbers that are versatile and long-lasting, and that leave little impact on the environment.