In the northeastern US and eastern Canada, pine, oak and maple are definitely renewable resources. Pine is easier and quicker than the local hardwoods, to be fa

In the northeastern US and eastern Canada, pine, oak and maple are definitely renewable resources. Pine is easier and quicker than the local hardwoods, to be fair. Using renewable wood for flooring is a carbon sink for the lifetime of the building, which can be a hundred years or more in New England. And like I said, I know of one softwood floor from the 1850s that's still gorgeous enough to photograph. And that wood had been abused over the century plus—it had been painted badly, and the building had been outright abandoned for a while. Laminate and engineered wood is unlikely to see more than a quarter century without clever care, because you can't actually sand the wood. If you never let it wear down to the wood, I suspect you can carefully hand-sand, and bond varnish to varnish, and buy an extra 20 years each time if you never delay a refinishing. But that's just a guess.