From good timber

When I was a child, I lived in a house with a big backyard, in which we had a huge tree, I would say about 10 or 15 meters high, and I dreamed of having a little house in it, a shelter where I could go to have fun and spend all my afternoons. Unfortunately, it remained just a wish. Curiously, searching the web for companies that work on the exterior of homes, I came across one that reminded me of this wish from when I was a kid. In addition to creating beautiful wooden decks, the company Trex (NYSE: TREX) also builds these wooden shelters that I wanted so badly.

While construction is important, so is durability. When we choose to make a home improvement, we expect the project to be well finished and last over time, and to that end, materials are an important key. The materials that the company Trex (NYSE: TREX) uses are different from traditional wood; these composite woods, as they call them, make them resistant to all types of weather but also to the sun, an enemy that can be equal to or worse than snow for wood. These climatic variations cause other materials, such as PVC or other woods, that are not properly protected from degrading over time or losing their shape. As I was searching the web, I started to think about the future, how my new terrace would look like and what maintenance I would have to do to it. The thought of minimal maintenance versus the effort and costs of maintaining a terrace in the traditional way makes me think that the most logical thing to do would be to opt for something more practical.

The sustainability of the materials can also be important, and the fact that composite woods contain 95% recycled materials is a big plus; firstly, this makes it more environmentally friendly and, secondly, because of the cost reduction it allows. The reclaimed wood in the terraces is combined with recycled plastic from a variety of sources ranging from paper towel wrapping to dry cleaning bags, sandwich bags, newspaper covers and grocery and shopping bags, forming the high-strength composite wood. An interesting fact is the number of recycled plastic bags it takes to build a 500-square-foot deck: nearly 140,000, a staggering number that makes Trex one of the largest bag recyclers in the United States.

Using recycled bags not only benefits the environment in terms of less wood used but also benefits all the rivers and seas, since a large part of all these bags and wood in bad condition, sadly, end up there, in the water that we consume and use every day. In one year alone, 400 million pounds of bags and wood are rescued from landfills to make composite wood in a totally ecological way.

The project of the terrace I want to build made me discover the high level of creativity of a company like Trex (NYSE: TREX), which working with something that may seem as simple as wood, used recycling as the backbone of their work, giving birth to these composite woods, durable, easy to maintain and contributing at the same time, to achieve a more sustainable environment.