Pay attention to the tub surrounds. Choosing materials for your bathtub and tub surround can affect your bathroom’s beauty, durability, and sustainability. These days, sustainable home improvement solutions are of importance. Because it is one of the most visited rooms in a house, remodelling it sustainably can reduce your environmental footprint.
What Is a Tub Surround?
An installation of a tub surround is a protective barrier put around a bathtub to guard the walls against water damage. It has the potential to act as an aesthetic component, improving the overall appearance of the bathroom. Typical surrounds generally exist as panels or tiles and may be created from a variety of materials, including natural stone, fibreglass, acrylic, ceramic, and even recycled materials. There exists a different environmental impact, durability, and maintenance needs for every material.
Choosing environmentally friendly materials for your bathtub backsplash or tub wall surrounds can decrease water usage, energy consumption, and waste, all the while helping you create a fashionable and useful bathroom.
Choosing environmentally friendly tub surround materials
Just before making decisions about sustainable tub surrounds, it is important to consider the environmental impact of production as well as durability and energy efficiency. We examine several usual materials for surround baths and evaluate their environmental impact below.
Recycled Glass Tiles
Recycled glass tiles are some of the most environmentally friendly solutions for tub wall surrounds. Produced from post-consumer glass resources such as window fragments and bottles, these tiles take shape via melting down and breaking them into a fresh form.
Also, tiles made from recycled glass show remarkable durability and are not vulnerable to mould growth, reducing the need for replacements and difficult cleaning substances. Because of the reflective characteristics of the surface, there’s more light in the bathroom, which reduces electricity use and correspondingly lowers energy costs. With a range of colours and styles on offer, recycled glass tiles create a sustainable yet fashionable option for your bathtub with surround.
Eco-Friendly Features
- Made from recycled materials
- During production, there is a low level of energy consumption.
- Durable and long-lasting
- Resistant to mold and mildew
Natural Stone
Weighing your options for natural stone such as granite, marble, or slate when it comes to a backsplash or bath surround suggests a choice that comes with wealth. It shows a standardised, sophisticated design and remarkable resilience. A review of the environmental consequences of natural stone entails an examination of the methods used for mining and cargo transport.
Attempting to acquire natural stone involves a significant energy investment and has the potential to produce unwanted consequences for the environment. Whatever happens, natural stone gives outstanding toughness; thus, it can last a lifetime with proper care, which lessens the desire for replacement and balances waste. Moreover, stone is a readily found material that does not give rise to unwelcome chemicals or pollutants in the ecosystem.
Turn natural stone into a more sustainable choice by picking local stone so as to cut down on emissions produced by transportation. Any stones remaining from previous projects can help us reduce waste and support resource conservation initiatives.
Eco-Friendly Features:
- Very reliable and persistent over time
- Does not give off dangerous chemicals
- May be obtained locally to lessen transportation radiation A naturally occurring
- biodegradable material.
Ceramic and Porcelain Tiles
A combination of their sturdiness, waterproof nature, and many design choices makes ceramic and porcelain tiles a preferred option for tub wall surrounds. All materials are made from natural clay that has been heated to high temperatures to form solid tiles.
Due to the high temperatures needed for firing, the production process for ceramic and porcelain tiles can become very energy intensive. If creating accessible environmental tiles is your goal, focus on products made from recycled resources or organisations that use energy-efficient production methods.
Ceramic and porcelain tiles can keep their surfaces clean without the need for tough chemicals. As time passes, the carbon footprint associated with cleaning and maintenance decreases.
Eco-Friendly Features:
- Made from natural materials
- Long-lasting and durable
- Convenient to maintain and simple to clean.
- Present recyclable materials and energy-efficient production techniques.
Bamboo Panels
Bamboo is acclaimed for its place among the most sustainable building materials offered at this time. Gathering momentum quickly and recovering more swiftly than the majority of natural assets, it emerges as a highly renewable material. For a homely and organic aesthetic in your bathroom, using bamboo panels for bathtub backsplashes or to enclose baths will give you excellent results.
Bamboo’s eco-friendliness increases because it needs only small amounts of water and does not require pesticides. It is also biodegradable; therefore, it will not contribute to landfill waste during its lifecycle closure. In addition to every other factor, bamboo has a natural characteristic that defends against moisture, mould, and bacteria, earning it a place as an excellent material for bathroom surrounds.
Even if bamboo panels make sense for the environment, it’s essential to confirm their sustainable sourcing status and the certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). As a result, this signifies that the bamboo arises from forests managed sustainably.
Eco-Friendly Features:
- A material that is both quickly renewable and biodegradable.
- Is a crop that needs few pesticides and water for its cultivation
- It is clearly resistant to moisture and bacteria.
- An organic, cosy aesthetic for bathroom encasements
Acrylic
Acrylic serves as a cheap, easy-to-setup, and lightweight option for tub wall surrounds. Acrylic’s sustainability rating is inferior to that of many other materials, principally due to its origin as a petroleum derivative. The production chain includes high-energy manufacturing, which generates emissions that contribute to environmental pollution.
Notwithstanding its higher environmental impact in manufacture, acrylic has a number of redeeming qualities about durability and maintenance. This demonstrates outstanding competence against cracks, fading, and chipping, resulting in less frequent replacements than with lower-quality materials. Because of its streamlined and unporous design, cleaning becomes easier, requiring fewer products and helping to reduce environmental harm over time.
Selecting acrylic for your bathtub with surround?
Make sure you choose manufacturers that use sustainable methods and advocate for recyclable acrylics. Moreove Moreover, because acrylic is lightweight, it requires less transport energy than its substantial alternatives.
Eco-friendly Features:
- Durable and long-lasting
- Because it is lightweight, it requires less energy to transport.
- Simple to clean, which lowers chemical consumption.
Recycled Plastic Panels
Recycled plastic panels are a relatively new and creative choice for bathtub backsplashes and tub wall surrounds. Incorporated into these panels are scraps of plastic from our consumption, encompassing plastic bottles and wrappers, to help decrease the amount that ends up in landfills and the requirement for fresh plastic production.
Because they are water resistant, as well as resistant to mildew and mould, recycled plastic panels are perfect for bathroom use. Being lightweight makes these items straightforward to handle, and they are simple to put in place, helping to ease labour costs and energy use during installation.
Eco-Friendly Features:
- Produced using materials recovered after consumer usage
- Features water resistance and fights against mould and mildew.
- Cuts back on plastic waste in landfills
- Light and simple to put in place
Points to Think About when picking on Eco-Friendly Tub Surrounds
When making a decision about your tub wall surrounds, it’s important to keep a few key sustainability factors in mind:
Maintenance:
Use only environmentally friendly products and materials that require minimal cleaning.
Material Sourcing: Using materials that come from your area or are recycled can help you reduce your environmental footprint.
Durability:
Look for items that are known to last in order to reduce the need for replacements and waste.
Low VOCs (volatile organic compounds):
Those materials with minimal VOC emissions are advantageous for both indoor air quality and general health.
FAQ’s
Can natural stone serve as a sustainable tub surround?
The health of the natural stone market depends on responsible and local sourcing. This solution is persistent and tends to last for a protracted duration, thereby lessening the need for substitutes; however, the process for extracting it may use substantial energy.
Can we consider acrylic tub surrounds to be eco-friendly?
Acrylic has the advantage of being durable and lightweight, but it’s production from petroleum makes it less friendly to the environment, helping to lower transportation emissions and reduce the number of replacements needed.
Could tub surrounds be made from recycled plastic?
Certainly, waste plastic panels are a sustainable choice. They are also water and mould resistant, making them ideal for bathroom applications because they reduce plastic waste.
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