State of Sustainability 2024: When it comes to minimizing their footprint, the leading flooring manufacturers find more ways to move the needle - August/September 2024

By Darius Helm

As an industry, flooring has been pursuing sustainability for over 20 years, and at this point, the low-hanging fruit is all but gone. However, in the energy-intensive, often polymer-driven business of flooring production, there is still much work to be done. The diverse strategies currently being deployed by flooring manufacturers to further reduce environmental footprints showcase both the ingenuity and commitment of green leaders.

FOCUS ON CARBON
When it comes to environmental credentials for flooring products, a major focus over the last few years has centered on measuring embodied carbon, which essentially quantifies the cradle-to-gate carbon burden. This is designed to cover Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions, including from energy used internally to make products, energy purchased from the grid or other external entities, and energy used by suppliers-for instance, suppliers of raw materials and flooring components or suppliers of products not made by the manufacturer, like all the LVT lines produced in Asia and sold here. And this also includes energy used in transportation of materials and products to the factory or packaging facility.

What embodied carbon does not include is what happens downstream-the “gate” is essentially the factory gate. Every product that leaves a factory has a unique downstream environmental burden. Some products will be trucked halfway across the country; others will be installed just down the road. Maintenance regimens will vary based on the end user. The product lifecycle will be based on a range of conditions: some will be torn out in just a few years, while others will be in place for decades; some will be recycled and others will be landfilled. As a result, from the vantage point of the manufacturer, it’s not possible to precisely detail their products’ downstream burden and capture it all in an embodied carbon number.

The full LCA (lifecycle assessment) of a product, including the length of its useful life, is not factored into embodied carbon, which is only calculated cradle to gate. But when one considers that a carpet might wear out in a decade while solid hardwood floors can last for a century and ceramic tile, in theory, for millennia, a critical measurement of relative environmental impacts becomes how many carpet installations equal one ceramic tile floor. For this reason, cradle-to-gate data for ceramic tile, which is produced with energy-intensive kilns, will show a significantly higher carbon footprint than is revealed by a cradle-to-grave analysis. It’s important to remember, though-and, if possible, factor in-that long-lifecycle floors like hardwood and ceramic don’t tend to last as long as they’re capable of lasting. They’re often replaced before their use-phase is complete, due to issues like ownership changes, changes in the use of the space, and new color and design directions.

Many of the leading producers of commercial flooring are working on offering carbon-neutral products, and in some cases, going further, which is technically carbon-negative, though sometimes called carbon-positive. To achieve that neutral or negative level just from internal progress is a tall order, and most of these firms buy carbon offsets to take them across the finish line. In some cases, a lot of offsets are needed, and in other cases, only a small offset is needed-and most manufacturers that use offsets emphasize that they’re working to reduce or eliminate them over time.

Offsets themselves can be controversial. On paper, the math is fairly straightforward. If a firm-for our purposes, a flooring manufacturer-has some kind of ownership over a process or endeavor that reduces carbon emissions, it can offset those reductions against the carbon it is actually responsible for emitting through its flooring production-under Scope 1, 2 or 3-regardless of where on the planet the reductions are occurring, because the climate crisis is a global, shared event. But in practice, there are myriad variables that need to be accounted for and assumptions that need to be agreed upon.

A lot of offsets come from projects tied to tracts of land-relating to land use, to ecosystems, to critical animal populations, to communities living on that land. Whatever the project, it must adhere to the concept of additionality-that the project itself is not taking advantage of, for instance, pre-existing environmentally favorable conditions but is actually providing some kind of measurable boost, a boost that would not occur in the normal course of events, all things being equal. You can’t buy a forest and claim credit for its sequestered carbon, for instance. And it’s fairly dubious whether an offset is truly climate positive when it’s achieved by protecting a natural resource or trees that sequester carbon in one parcel of land if it means that those who mine those resources or cut down trees for a living can instead just move to another parcel of land.

To be fair, there are plenty of carbon offset programs that take great care to produce credible and effective projects, and there are also verification organizations, as well as carbon offset

registries, which ensure, among other things, that an offset purchased by a firm is “retired,” meaning that the same environmental boost that the company paid for can’t, in any form, be sold anew to another company. Also, the wave of scrutiny these programs are facing should serve to separate the wheat from the chaff and, hopefully, provide a path forward for responsible firms committed to doing their part to improve environmental conditions.

Firms like HMTX and Universal Fibers emphasize that their use of offsets is focused as much on magnifying their climate-positive impact as on reducing their environmental footprints.

Renewable-energy offsets are another instrument for reducing a company’s environmental burden. Some energy programs are direct and close to home, like American Biltrite’s manufacturing of ABPure Infinity carbon-neutral flooring, which is fueled by the purchase of renewable natural gas captured from a local organic waste project. Others are remote but fundamentally equivalent, like Shaw’s purchase of renewable energy credits from a Texas wind farm.

Some firms don’t purchase carbon offsets and focus entirely on internal initiatives. Most prominent among them is Interface, which announced earlier this year that it would stop buying carbon offsets, instead focusing on direct carbon reductions. Currently, all carpet tiles using its carbon-negative (without offsets) CQuest BioX backing end up as carbon-neutral finished products.

CIRCULARITY
Another term that we often hear these days is circularity, from product circularity-which goes beyond the scope of embodied carbon and is similar to the cradle-to-cradle concept first introduced by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart over 20 years ago-to the circular economy concept, a broader approach that promotes the continuous reuse and recycling of resources, along with other climate-positive concepts, like product life extension strategies and regenerative practices, through an economically sustainable system.

Malisa Maynard, Mohawk’s chief sustainability officer, cites product circularity as a central focus, noting that it challenges the firm to rethink everything from product design to water and waste resources and end-of-life strategies. Both Shaw and Mohawk cite the expansion of their recycling and reclamation programs to include hard surface flooring as examples of their embrace of circularity. Nox is in the midst of building its Bio-Circular Balanced PVC product offering. And HMTX has its SRP thermoplastic polyurethane PVC-alternative, a fully recyclable product with content from recycled drink bottles.

RESILIENT REVOLUTION
The resilient flooring category, led by rigid LVT, has grown significantly over the last decade, and it’s currently about the size of the carpet category in dollars, long the biggest slice of the flooring pie. And while carpet has a recycling infrastructure that, though imperfect and largely reliant on California, provides a mechanism for post-consumer carpet collection, recycling and reuse, there is currently no such infrastructure for vinyl flooring.

One of the biggest challenges for vinyl floor recycling is the issue of legacy chemicals, the most problematic of which are the hazardous orthophthalates that were commonly used as plasticizers. While the industry moved away from these chemistries a decade ago, many of those phthalate-laced floors are still in use today, and there are also heavy-metal stabilizers to contend with, as well as fillers-all of which are barriers to the creation of a clean, pure recycled-waste stream.

Today, most firms capture and reuse their post-industrial vinyl waste and some, like Shaw and Mohawk, have expanded their in-house reclamation programs beyond carpet to reclaim their own commercial vinyl flooring. Many have products with substantial post-industrial content. However, to date, there has been no real movement toward a post-consumer reclamation system.

The Vinyl Institute’s Vinyl Sustainability Council (VSC) is tasked with advancing sustainability efforts in the PVC industry, working to bring together the entire supply chain, says VSC sustainability vice president Jay Thomas. That includes the full range of producers, as well as other stakeholders, like retailers, end users, A&D, etc.

VSC membership includes flooring firms like CFL, HMTX, Novalis, Tarkett, Mannington, Interface, Lonseal and Milliken. And Tarkett, HMTX and Mannington have attained Silver status in VSC’s +Vantage Vinyl program, which is made up of firms actively working to improve their sustainability profiles, backed by third-party verification from Greencircle Certified.

Flooring is one of the smallest vinyl segments. In terms of PVC resin consumption, at around 11.5 billion pounds annually in the U.S. and Canada, according to the 2023 American Chemistry Council Resin Report, 48% of that is used by rigid PVC producers-mostly pipes and tubes. Siding, cladding, film, sheet, windows and doors make up another 23%. Flooring, fencing and decking combined make up only 6% of resin consumption.

So, about half the market is rigid PVC, which is a much cleaner material than flooring because it isn’t formulated with plasticizers. Also, according to Thomas, rigid PVC consumed in North America is also produced here, while the majority of vinyl flooring comes from Asia and is made from Asian resin. And while North American PVC resin is produced using membrane technology-which is the cleanest PVC production technology-there’s a risk that Chinese PVC is produced using more hazardous mercury catalyst or asbestos-diaphragm processes. Lead salt stabilizers are also commonly used in Chinese PVC, and recent studies have indicated that orthophthalates are still used as plasticizers. All of which is to say that, out of all the types of vinyl consumed in North America, vinyl flooring is among the most problematic and the most challenging to recycle.

VSC’s focus includes recycling, decarbonization and the sustainable development of products. With $3 million in funding from key PVC resin producers, VSC has a grant program for post-consumer recycling. Over the last year and a half, it has so far awarded about $2 million to 19 organizations covering a range of projects, from repurposing vinyl billboards for temporary roofing for refugees and disaster relief to creating after-market vinyl components for the automotive industry.

NATURALLY GREEN
In the last few years, bio-based content has been used to elevate the environmental profile of traditionally synthetic products. It’s in Interface and Shaw carpet tile backings, in
PVC-free resilient flooring alternatives from firms like HMTX, and in greener vinyl formulations from firms like Nox. And, notably, there are also products that are naturally green, from wood flooring and cork to products with bio-based formulations, the most prominent being linoleum.

When it comes to PVC-free resilient alternatives, it’s not enough to replace the polymer or use bio-based content. It’s also essential that the product meet or exceed the performance standards of the products it is competing with, and it also has to be cost-competitive. And these can both be massive obstacles.

Over the last decade, many vinyl alternatives have come and gone, often because they couldn’t meet vinyl’s high-performance levels. And those that can match vinyl in performance tend to be premium priced, a significant barrier to finding traction in the market. Many of the PVC-free commercial products introduced in the last couple of years claim to match the performance of vinyl flooring, but most are still costly.

THE CHEAPEST MAY BE THE GREENEST
Meanwhile, there’s a product category that, while mostly sold to the residential market, meets most of these key criteria, with a compelling green story and notable affordability, and that’s laminate flooring.

When people talk about bio-based products, they usually cite solid and engineered hardwood, but laminate is arguably even greener. For one thing, the wood used in solid hardwood or in the veneers of engineered wood is high-value material from slow-growth hardwood trees. Laminate is mostly made up of a medium- or high-density coreboard, to which is attached a backing and paper layers on top. And that coreboard, accounting for about 94% of the product by weight, is generally composed of upcycled waste wood fiber or material from fast-growing softwoods like yellow pines (used by Swiss Krono and Mohawk, among others). The loblolly pine Swiss Krono uses grows more than 24” per year. So, out of the gate, laminate’s bio-based content has a stronger environmental story than wood flooring-though hardwood flooring tends to have a longer lifecycle.

The other main ingredient in laminate (about 3% of the composition by weight) is melamine resin, a combination of organic, naturally occurring and abundant compounds, including urea, ammonia and formaldehyde. It’s used to bind together the coreboard, and it’s also infused in the paper top layer to give laminate its formidable scratch resistance.

Laminates have historically had a limited position in the commercial market; they’re generally specified for light commercial applications. The issue is the coreboard, which is susceptible to moisture. But over the last few years, the waterproof story of rigid LVT has driven laminate producers to work harder on the water resistance of their cores, with a good deal of success.

The market leader, Mohawk, has paved the way with its RevWood line, and in fact, it now has a commercial product, RevWood Contract, that comes with an EPD that depicts its strong environmental story-with the GWPi (global warming potential, including biogenic carbon) for its 10mm padded laminate clocking in at -9.97kg CO2e/m2.

And just in the last year, both Mohawk and AHF have introduced laminate hybrids with modified coreboards and melamine surface protection, PureTech and Ingenious Plank, respectively, which go to the market as PVC-free alternatives. At 5.6mm for a padded product, PureTech is a much thinner product than a typical laminate, thanks to its modified core. These products are being sold into the residential market right now, but if they continue boosting those performance attributes-Maynard notes that PureTech has up to three times the scratch resistance of typical PVC products, and its EPD depicts a GWPi of -6.27kg CO2e/m2-they could offer a compelling story to commercial specifiers.

However, the real opportunity may lie in the residential market, a market which, sad to say, has shown little interest in sustainable products (except at the higher end). However, the reason for the lack of interest may actually be the solution, because most homeowners don’t want to pay more to reduce the environmental footprint of their homes. One has to wonder how they would respond if they found out they could do it by paying less.

Kenn Busch, the founder of Climate Positive Now and Material Intelligence and a developer of CEUs for architects and designers, has been taking a closer look at laminate flooring. He notes that about half the chemical content of wood, by weight, is stored carbon. So, the coreboard from a 10mm laminate in a 20’x20’ living room is storing about 400 pounds of naturally captured carbon. Using data from a cradle-to-gate LCA from the Composite Panel Association, Busch estimates that’s 40% more carbon than is released in the process of bringing that wood from the forest to the living room.

It may be jumping the gun, but there are signs that the residential flooring market may be taking sustainability more seriously, though it’s coming from big business, not homeowners. Noah Chitty, AHF’s vice president of sustainability and technical services, has reported that in the last two or three months, the firm, to the surprise of everyone, has started to receive inquiries, particularly from homebuilders and multifamily operations, about environmental data on the flooring products they use. Barbara June, president of NALFA (the North American Laminate Flooring Association), says she heard similar reports at the D.C. flooring summit held in mid-July. (For more on this event, see Strategic Exchange in this issue).

Will the homeowner follow? Let’s hope so. The clock is ticking.

Copyright 2024 Floor Focus 

Related Topics:Shaw Floors, HMTX, Mannington Mills, Shaw Industries Group, Inc., Mohawk Industries, Novalis Innovative Flooring, AHF Products, Tarkett, Interface