State of Sustainability 2025: The sustainability movement is increasingly centering on the drive toward a circular economy – Aug/Sept 2025
By Darius Helm
As the concept of circularity becomes the key driver in the sustainability focus in the built environment, it’s becoming clear that its success relies on a new level of collaboration between stakeholders, with outside industries and, perhaps most challenging, with competitors.
There’s already nothing easy or straightforward about the business of sustainability, from developing production processes for greener products to reducing waste and energy use to navigating the certification landscape and handling the alarming volume of red tape.
To their credit, flooring producers have been working on greening their manufacturing for years, and in some cases, two or three decades. They’ve created incredible efficiencies, reduced emissions, recaptured post-industrial waste and shifted to less toxic chemistries. But the path to sustainability is a long and demanding one, with the finish line perpetually just out of sight.
Now, sustainability is further driving product manufacturers out of their comfort zone. In a recent FloorDaily podcast about the second annual Flooring Sustainability Summit, held in Washington, D.C. in July, Malisa Maynard, Mohawk’s chief sustainability officer, notes that there was a lot of discussion about circularity and how it’s not a single-issue topic. She adds, “It’s really complex, and it’s going to require collaboration across our whole value chain.”
Across the entire field of sustainability, there’s more talk about collaboration and the need to seek out and identify partners that can help them close the loop on their product ingredients. Baked into the new LEED v5 is stronger interdisciplinary collaboration. Referencing Mindful Material’s Common Materials Framework, Maynard points out that its integration into the new LEED version “is driving alignment across the built environment.”
Circulating carbon
There are varying definitions of a circular economy. At its core, it’s about circulating the flow of reclaimed materials back into valuable product and reducing the production of new materials, with fundamental sustainability steps to ensure minimal carbon burdens in the products and minimal residual waste. Some interpret this as closed-loop, with reclaimed flooring materials going back into new flooring, but others feel that as long as reclaimed materials are cycled back into the built environment or into other product streams, it qualifies as circular, though such pathways tend to spiral toward an inevitable downcycling. The most effective interpretation, that products be recycled back into equivalent products, may be the hardest to achieve, but that hasn’t stopped flooring producers from pursuing that goal.
Shaw’s vice president of global sustainability, Candi Hampton, notes that a successful circularity system requires designing with the end in mind. “You have to start at the front end,” she says, assessing material capability, performance, degradation and other factors. She points to the development of EcoWorx a quarter century ago, when the firm worked with the original creators of the Cradle to Cradle sustainability concept, Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart. The development of EcoWorx Resilient enables Shaw to expand the breadth of its Cradle to Cradle strategy, at the same time offering alternatives to PVC.
“Tarkett has made a strategic decision to prioritize recycled content in its product lines, based on our Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)-approved climate goals,” reports Roxane Spears, vice president of sustainability for Tarkett North America. “This focus supports our long-term commitment to a circular economy, where materials are kept in use for as long as possible and are reused at the end of their life. We believe maximizing recycled content is one of the most effective strategies to reduce environmental impact, lower carbon emissions, and increase material efficiency at scale.”
The vinyl issue
Vinyl products are a challenge to fit into the circularity framework. Driven by rigid core products like WPC and SPC, vinyl has been the fastest-growing flooring category for over a decade, and last year, it surpassed carpet to be the biggest category in the industry. Recycling it is already problematic because much of the vinyl flooring being replaced these days is suffused with legacy chemicals, like heavy metals and orthophthalates. Some manufacturers have started to take back vinyl by expanding their internal programs beyond carpet recycling, often limiting takeback to products they themselves have manufactured. While this certainly meets the circularity standard, it’s not necessarily a viable mechanism for smaller firms and for managing the huge volumes of imported vinyl flooring, some of which-if history is any guide-will contain problematic ingredients.
Most industry experts agree that a viable vinyl recycling system requires flooring producers to work closely together, not an easy task, and it also means working with the larger vinyl producing community for not just a reclamation framework but also to develop markets for those reclaimed materials. It’s worth noting that, according to Market Insights, resilient flooring consumed in the U.S. last year topped five billion square feet. That’s a lot of product, and it’s going to take a fundamentally robust reclamation system to divert it from landfills a few years down the road.
The Vinyl Institute’s Vinyl Sustainability Council (VSC) is leading the way in bringing together industry players. Flooring members include HMTX, Novalis, Mannington, Tarkett and, earlier this summer, Roppe Holding Company. VSC recently formed a partnership with the European Council of Vinyl Manufacturers to strengthen global collaboration on sustainability.
In early 2023, VSC launched its Viability grant program to help drive post-consumer PVC recycling, supporting everything from research and development to advanced recycling, equipment purchases, program management and educational programs. A handful of leading PVC resin producers contributed
$3 million to the program, which to date has issue 25 projects a total of $2.6 million in grants.
High-performing hardwood
Using natural and rapidly renewable materials can play a big role in lowering the embodied carbon of products. On the soft surface side, it’s used as an ingredient in carpet tile backings-for instance, by Shaw and Interface-and on the hard surface side, it’s showing up in PVC-free resilient products. A lot of the biobased content is used in the production of polymers, like polyurethanes, enabling these products to go in the same recycling stream as their petroleum-derived equivalents. And that also lets manufacturers shift their sourcing of biobased content as necessary-between soy, sugarcane and corn, for example.
At the other end of the spectrum are the harvested floors, like hardwood. Hardwood’s biogenic nature makes it one of the greenest flooring categories. However, performance issues relating to both surface durability and vulnerability to moisture have limited its adoption in the commercial market, where demand for sustainable products is high; a large percentage of hardwood flooring ends up in the residential market. Commercial designers and end users are nevertheless enamored of wood’s aesthetic, which they largely choose to satisfy with wood looks in vinyl flooring.
Over the last few years, two firms have developed higher-performing wood flooring products that could help drive traction in the commercial market. Both AHF Products and Sweden’s Bjelin have developed products with hardened, compressed top veneers that are better suited to the demands of commercial applications, and both launched their products on the residential side before adding commercial programs.
AHF’s Densified Engineered Hardwood, which is made in Somerset, Kentucky, goes to the commercial market under the TimberTones line. The compression of the veneers enables the firm to use species that are typically too soft to perform even in the residential market, including pine. According to the firm, its products are six times more dent-resistant and four times more scratch-resistant than typical hardwood. Its six-sided water-resistant coating protects the floor from topical staining and damage for up to eight hours.
Bjelin, which manufactures its Woodura Hardened Wood in Sweden and Croatia, has published an EPD for its Sweden-made product, achieving a negative global warming potential of -5.9kg CO2e/m2. Its commercial offering is mostly white oak, along with some walnut and ash. The firm reports that it has found early traction in the hospitality market, leading the firm to exhibit at HD Expo earlier this year, with BDNY to follow in the fall. It has also seen demand in the multifamily and education segments.
Commercial specifiers are a cautious bunch, so it could take some time for these products to gain a foothold in that market. But compared to hardwood products in the past that targeted commercial, these new product constructions offer much better performance profiles, further enhancing their carbon profiles.