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Isn't most carpet made of synthetic fibers? i'm not sure how staying with carpet is any better. And I can't imagine that polyurethane finish on hardwood floors
by tcoff91 2y ago
Isn't most carpet made of synthetic fibers? i'm not sure how staying with carpet is any better.
And I can't imagine that polyurethane finish on hardwood floors is good either.
- vundercind 2y agoYeah, and I bet even the expensive wool stuff that only rich people buy is treated with scotch guard and flame retardants with questionable health effects.
- lazide 2y agoBonus - scotch guard == PFAS
- OutOfHere 2y agoTo my knowledge, olefin synthetic carpet is not known to contain phthalates. I would however avoid the ones that claim to be stain-resistant, as they're more likely to contain iffy coatings.
- throwway120385 2y agoI would probably resin coat my floor instead of using urethane, but I would agree there. Even concrete floor contains silicates. I also wonder what kind of microparticles scuff off of a tile floor. Shellac or traditional varnish are probably the only things you could put on your floor that aren't produced with an industrial process. Shellac in particular is the harvested secretions of a beetle that have been cleaned and dissolved in alcohol. But it's water-soluble and so probably not appropriate for use on a wood floor. You could also use tung oil or boiled linseed oil but you'd have to sand down to #0000 steel wool to get it to shine like urethane. Tung oil is a nice coating because it doesn't turn orange like BLO, but either one you will have to keep applying every few years or the floor will stop repelling water. Obviously we'd end up with huge Tung plantations or Shellac plantations if we tried to replace all of our floor coverings with this stuff.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoI’d worry less about silicates than anything. We evolved along sandy coastlines not polyurethane or pvc.
- kragen 2y agocrystalline silica is an iarc group 1 carcinogen, the highest-concern category, and occupational illnesses due to crystalline silica exposure have been well known for thousands of years
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoWhen I built my home I used concrete floors that I then kept waxed. It seemed like the best solution I could find. But then we had to cover the floors with wool rugs because the acoustics were painful.
- kragen 2y agowool is pretty great; the worst you can say about it is that it's a mild allergen and kind of expensive just to disambiguate, though, the risk of silica exposure from walking around on a concrete floor, or even sweeping it, is not worth worrying about. i wouldn't clean it with a leaf blower though
- kjkjadksj 2y agoI assume you don’t cut tile with a tile saw very often without a respirator so its a non issue.
- kragen 2y agopolyurethane is a resin tung oil is pretty toxic. boiled linseed oil has heavy metal salts in it to make it polymerize, though typically nowadays these are cobalt, iron, and manganese rather than lead; calcium and zinc are basically nontoxic alternatives shellac is not water-soluble; it's alcohol-soluble and thermoplastic the plantation sizes necessary to coat everyone's floor with tung oil or shellac are fairly modest
- teekert 2y agoCarpets often repel water… using PFAS.