Company: Trex
Price: About $6.23 a square foot
When available: Now
It’s not just that no wood is used to manufacture this decking material, it’s green in other ways as well. For one thing, 95% of its content is recycled plastic that could otherwise clog landfills.
The company recycles 1.5 million plastic grocery bags a year — 70% of all the entire nation’s recycled output. A 500-square-foot Trex deck contains an amazing 140,000 bags.
The plastic is heated and combined with pulverized wood chips and pushed through an extruder to form the plastic deck planks, according to company spokesman Adam Zambanini.
The resulting product is scratch-, fade- and stain-resistant. There’s almost no maintenance and it won’t rot out on you in 10 years and have to be replaced.
It’s a little more expensive than wood decking but it comes with a 25-year warranty.
“You’d go through two wood decks in that time,” said Zambanini.
Railings for the decking are made from reclaimed wood, and the company recovers about 600 million pounds of plastic and wood fragments from landfills each year.
