Environmental Factors in Home Insulation
With energy costs and environmental concerns on everyone's minds these days, insulation is more important than ever in home construction. Proper insulation optimizes energy consumption, helping the environment and lowering your heating and cooling costs. But certain types of insulation can also be bad for the environment. You have to consider some important environmental factors when insulating a home. Does this Spark an idea?
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Cellulose
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Cellulose is one material used for making insulation. It is helpful to the environment because of its energy saving features. Unfortunately, although it is recyclable, it requires huge quantities of trees, which have to be planted and then cut. This has a great cost to the environment, both in using energy to plant and cut trees and in the destruction of mature forests. Production of cellulose insulation can also cause pollution of water resources in certain instances as well.
Fiberglass Insulation
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Fiberglass insulation is especially helpful at regulating the flow of energy into the house, which is an important environmental factor because it helps to save energy. Fiberglass insulation also uses environmentally safe, recyclable materials. Unfortunately, production of fiberglass comes at a considerable cost. Production results in air pollution and uses lots of energy. Fiberglass insulation also uses boron, which is being sharply depleted from both the southwestern U.S. and Turkey where it was originally found in abundance. Furthermore, it is not the safest of materials for the human body. Exposure to fiberglass insulation can result in some health problems including skin allergies and sore throats. Improperly installed fiberglass insulation even has the potential to cause cancer. The key to wise use of fiberglass insulation is to have it properly installed by professionals.
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Foam insulation
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Although foam insulation is wonderful at reducing energy after it is installed, it too uses a great deal of energy in its production. Even worse, the production process associated with most types of foam insulation requires petroleum, which is a scarce resource. Polyurethane foam especially uses a great deal of petroleum in the production process. If you opt for foam insulation, recycled foam-board insulation may be the most environmentally friendly choice, as it is made from material that would have ended up in a landfill anyway. Less energy is used in production, and the insulation also tends to be less costly than traditional polyurethane foam.
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