Environmentally Friendly Insulation

Lotus has a post up today about ways her family is trying to reduce the amount of excess crud in their lives. It’s part of a project she’s initiated called “Support Beauty in Nature Day”.

In the spirit of environmentally friendly and sustainable products, I thought I’d share the latest findings from our post-squirrel debacle quest to have our attic insulated.*

Our attic is also a storage area, so having fiberglass or other similar loose insulation blown in, which would be unsettled each time we or the next owners of the house go up there, is out of the question as far as I’m concerned. Plus, we’d much rather use a recycled or environmentally friendly product if we can.

Wool seems to be my leading choice right now. The U.K.’s Second Nature (makers of ThermaFleece insulation) has a very informative website, and I haven’t found the information they supply contradicted in any other sources, so although I’m loath to rely on a producer’s claims about a product, this seems trustworthy. (And easy to link to, I’m lazy today).

Manufacturers of fiberglass insulation always tell me wool is only available in Europe and is an inferior material. Not so on either count. You can get wool in the U.S. if you purchase it from Good Shepherd Wool in Canada.

Bonded Logic’s Ultratouch, which is insulation made from recycled denim, is appealing, but I must admit to being biased. We love sheep. If the City won’t let me keep them, I can at least stuff my attic with their wool!

There are lots of other recycled or organic materials being tested or used as home insulators. Recycled cellulose is popular, but trips that base instinct in my brain that makes it impossible for me to look at the stuff as anything less than an inferno waiting to happen. Although cellulose insulation is treated with a soup of fire-retardant chemicals to minimize (but not eliminate) it’s flammability, that’s not a real selling point – that just means it’s back to being a product that requires a lot of chemicals in manufacturing. Plus it’s then another potential indoor-pollutant.

Soy husks and mushrooms specially grown to be insulation bricks are also recent developments, but not ones I’m particularly interested in.

Best headline: “Mushroom insulation is no hallucination.”

We haven’t made any decisions yet. I’m sure we’ll use commercial, fiberglass insulation in the walls when we have the bathroom renovated, I must admit that for that particular project it’s the path of least resistance and that makes it most attractive because I’ve like to see that bathroom get renovated in my lifetime.

There are more options every day and research into products like this is difficult and tedious, but not any more tedious than parsing the claims made by producers of fiberglass or rock-wool insulation materials.

*It only takes squirrels a few days to do thousands of dollars in damage to your attic, so if you think it’s romantic and cute to have critters in your attic, think again.