Manufacturing: A Net User of Waste

While planting wildflowers and recruiting purple martins are important environmental actions, our entire reason for existence is to make flooring. So it is only fitting that our one big environmental idea, our most challenging goal, has to do with our manufacturing processes.

We want to be a net user of waste.

We want to use more waste from outside sources than we produce. Put mathematically, that means:

There are two things we need to do to reach this goal: decrease the amount of waste we produce, and increase the amount of recycled material in our products. We continually improve our product formulations and source new waste streams to increase our “waste in,” and we improve practices in our facilities and invest in new technology to produce flooring as cleanly, conservatively and efficiently as possible

Many of our initiatives are simple, such as reusing and recycling core and yarn tubes, but some take more research and yield greater results. Our VCT contains 1.5% recycled content, ArtCraft carpet tile is made entirely of post-production yarn, and Relay resilient has 40% recycled content. While these contribute greatly to increasing our “waste in” amount, we also try to decrease our overall environmental footprint with actions like our switch to ultra-low VOC water-based inks that eliminated the need for solvents in clean up and for incinerators to remove contaminates from the air. In fact the inks were such an improvement, we were awarded the Most Valuable Pollution Prevention Award.

The linked pages contain more information about some of our actions.

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