country / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Are laminate counters good? Laminate countertops were a long-time staple of residential kitchen & bathroom construction, but they started to fall off in popularity around the time rockstars stopped wearing spandex, which was somewhere in the 80s. A trend started at that time towards alternatives to laminate counter...

Healthier kitchen components - countertops If you're into healthy green homes like we are here at Ecohome, there's a lot to think about when choosing a healthier kitchen. Firstly, some beautiful kitchen cabinets, preferably built from FSC certified woods and formaldehyde-free plywood boxes, and that's even before choos...

The most common kitchen counters you will find in homes are traditional laminate countertops. And they certainly live up to the adage ‘you get what you pay for’, as most of them still contain a lot of formaldehyde and they aren’t very durable. Maybe the latest generation of laminate countertops for kitchens & bathr...

There are substantial environmental impacts that come with shipping building materials around the globe, particularly something as weighty as granite. It is for this  reason that the credit MR5 in the Materials and Resources category of LEED for Homes certification exists. To get a point for buying local, LEED has a li...

How to price a sustainable kitchen countertop? As a professional cabinetmaker, I have often been asked how much a kitchen costs. There is no accurate answer of course, though when pressed, I would have to say somewhere between $18-30,000. The size of your kitchen, material choices and your taste in finishing makes it i...

Green kitchen cabinets - why does it matter? To improve the air quality of your home, that's why! “Indoor air quality” refers to the quality of the air in any home environment. The potential impact of indoor air quality on human health nationally is important for many reasons, including: Americans spend on average abo...

...country then? In a report a few days ago (December 2021), and with another very satisfying visual graphic from Visual Capitalist, the scale of the North American problem appears: CO2 emissions per capita by country worldwide - December 2021 - another stunning infographic by © Visual Capitalist   Per capita CO2 or car...

...country. Some options that you might like to investigate are jobs in your community, agriculture production, or if most of your work is by computer, look into tele-comuting. Some of the more progressive companies are realizing the benefits of allowing people to work from home, such as worker satisfaction and savings on...

Construction is a dirty business, and living in a home under renovation can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses, it can also lead to issues developing that people didn't suffer from before. Air that is full of dust and chemicals can cause respiratory irritations even among adults who don't suffer from such...

...country for LEED for the second year in a row. The Canadian government names buildings as the fourth leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, contributing 12 per cent of the country's overall emissions by sector. Emissions from the Canadian building sector have dropped in Canada since 2005 even as the ...

Livos is a Quebec manufacturer of natural wood finishing oils, and they are very transparent about the composition of their products which are mainly plants and some other natural materials. There are also no heavy metals used in the colouring pigments, so it is a completely sustainably-made and healthy product.  "In o...