Sustainable Window Covering Materials: Eco-Friendly Options for Home and Officeย
Many property owners associate sustainable best practices with tactics to save money on electricity, conserve water usage or reduce the amount of waste they discard. But there are many other strategies for promoting a sustainable home or office – both large and small – and they all add up. One smaller strategy you might not have initially considered is your window covering materials.
That’s right – window covering materials. While window treatments like blinds, curtains and shades can help with things like heat loss and gain and conserve electricity via natural lighting by filtering how much of the sun is let into an environment during various parts of the day, the materials that these treatments are made from also help promote a sustainable environment.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the sustainable window covering materials that you should know. Here’s a closer look:
Sustainable Window Treatment Options
Looking for sustainable materials for your commercial blinds or residential window treatments? Here’s some of what you have to choose from:
Look for Greenguard Gold Certification
Wondering whether a window treatment is sustainable or not? One way to verify its sustainability is by looking for Greenguard Gold certification, which means the materials are Indoor Air Quality Certified. Greenguard certification is among the highest standards that window treatments can achieve. It signifies that products are purpose-built and have undergone extensive testing to verify that they don’t emit chemical emissions during product usage, which can impact the quality of the indoor air in a home or office. Poor indoor air quality is associated with various health conditions, including headaches, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, eye irritation and respiratory issues.
All Hunter Douglas products are Greenguard Gold certified, so you can rest assured that when you shop this brand, you’re getting window treatments that have undergone extensive testing to meet the Greenguard standards and requirements. We’re proud to be a wholesale provider of Hunter Douglas products.
Some popular Hunter Douglas window treatments include sheer shades, cellular shades, Roman shades, commercial roller shades, woven woods, shutters and vertical blinds.
Shop Sustainable Brands
Hunter Douglas is just one example of a sustainable residential and commercial window treatments brand. Graber is another one that’s known for its sustainability best practices – and we’re also proud to be a wholesale provider of Graber products as well.
What makes Graber window treatment products so sustainable? In addition to practicing eco-friendly forestry practices to manufacture wood-based window treatments, Graber is also known for its sustainable manufacturing methods – from how it sources materials to how it packages them. Every step of the manufacturing process is done with the environment in mind and all metals, fabrics, wood and paper are designed to be recycled at the end of their usable lifetimes.
Many Graber products are also Greenguard certified.
Look for Eco-Friendly Materials
Aside from shopping for certain brands and looking for certain certifications, some materials are simply just more sustainable than others. In this sense, materials matter. For instance, one of the most sustainable window covering materials is bamboo – largely because it’s a renewable resource that presents an ideal alternative to traditional hardwood.
Woven woods are another sustainable material. Like bamboo, these treatments are crafted from all-natural, renewable resources. Such sources commonly include grass, bamboo and jute – not plastic or synthetic plastic. When you’re shopping for sustainable materials, you’ll definitely want to stay away from anything plastic. Though this material may offer cost advantages, plastic is created from fossil fuels and isn’t biodegradable at its end of life. Because of this, it often winds up in landfills, oceans or as litter.
Contact Presidential Window Products
For more information on Graber and Hunter Douglas products and to learn more about sustainable window covering materials, contact us today.ย
Image courtesy of Graber Blinds. ย Featuring natural woven wood shades.