There are several glues on the market now for attaching wood flooring to the sub floor, considered green glues because they have very low VOC’s compared to typical flooring glues. They tend to be water based instead of chemical based.
We have experimented with them but haven’t had good results.
Firstly, using anything water based under a floor alters the humidity content of the flooring. This is a dangerous game. It can cause buckling.
Secondly, if it is water based this also means that if you spill water on the floor in the future it is possible that the glue will unstick.
But mostly the water based green glue just doesn’t hold as well. We have had problems of planks coming undone soon after applying them.
The movie Greening of Southie is a documentary about the construction of a green building in Boston. They laid thousands and thousands of feet of flooring using green glue and it all came back up. It was a huge mistake. They lost a lot of money and it mired the contractor and developer in a slew of lawsuits.
We’ve decided that normal glue is too toxic and green glue is a little less toxic but pretty useless. So we just don’t use the stuff in our green renovations of Brooklyn brownstones.
This is especially since the new findings of glues of all kinds containing toxins that effect our nerves.