Atlanta, GA, May 30--Atlanta-based Romanoff Floor Covering, one of America's largest flooring installation companies, and one of the largest flooring installation contractors for The Home Depot, is switching almost exclusively to WOODSTALK 1/4" underlayment and moving away from tropical lauan underlayment that is an industry mainstay.
Dow Bioproducts Ltd. manufactures WOODSTALK composite fiberboard products from annually renewable wheat straw using a formaldehyde-free polyurethane resin.
The move to WOODSTALK underlayment follows several months of product tests by Romanoff Floor Covering at the request of The Home Depot to find greener, more environmentally responsible building products and methods.
"The Home Depot purchasing policy to eliminate the purchase of wood and wood products from endangered regions around the world and to promote and support the development and use of alternative environmental products has produced a direct ripple effect that has resulted in a significant change in the material we will use in the future," Romanoff Floor Covering owner and president Doug Romanoff said.
"The highly-segmented flooring installation industry is very resistant to change because new products usually require compromises compared to products installers are already familiar with," he said. "Compromises include things like higher costs, more-difficult or time-consuming installation procedures.
"With WOODSTALK underlayment, we found no compromises were required, and during our tests we had terrific buy-in from our installers who found the product very easy to install. Compared to lauan, WOODSTALK is competitively priced, is uniform in quality, is consistently dense with no voids, does not delaminate, causes no color migration, cuts cleanly and is consistent in thickness. It meets all our criteria for an ideal underlayment and is in many ways superior to lauan," Romanoff said.
"The icing on the cake for me is the environmental advantage, because WOODSTALK is made from annually renewable wheat straw that is normally a waste product. I've often felt a twinge of guilt when I think of the millions of square feet of tropical lauan our industry has installed under finished flooring and the millions of acres of rainforest harvested to supply that over the 28 years I've been in business."
Romanoff Flooring has been in business for close to three decades, and has seven service centers in eight states in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic States that employ between 500-700 installers in 200 crews. The company maintains rigorous training and quality control procedures across its organization, and makes about 1,000 installations a week, laying about one- half million square feet of all types of flooring including: wood, carpeting, vinyl and ceramic although underlayment is mainly required for sheet vinyl and tile. Romanoff is one of the top two or three flooring installation companies in a rapidly growing industry that currently has more than 15,000 installer companies across the country.
