Angela, what's your role at ASP Floors?

I’m the Marketing and Sustainability Manager at ASP Access Floors, and I've been here for over 10 years now. When I started here, I was the Sales and Marketing Manager, however I moved solely into Marketing & Sustainability as, over time, sustainability has become a larger focus for our company.

Talk us through access floors - what are they, exactly?

An access floor is a structural flooring system. Almost all commercial buildings now create a false floor cavity underneath the floor, and then the flooring finishes go over the top of that. ASP provides that structural floor system. The access floor provides an underfloor cavity to house different services like data, electrical, comms, and hydraulics. The flooring is designed to be modular. In Australia, it's based on a 600 by 600 grid which provides our clients flexibility for maintenance, as they’re able to lift one panel at any point across the floor. It makes refurbishments and refits, for example, incredibly easy. And because the panels are so robust, they last the entire lifespan of that building.

Angela, what does sustainability mean to you?

It's really about ensuring that the impact of our buildings and human footprint are minimised as much as possible to preserve our environment for generations to come. We all want our children to have a healthy and happy environment to live in and continue on with. I think that the building industry, as a community, needs to make sure that sustainability is not just spoken about at a management level in companies, but actually filters all the way down to site and installations. For ASP sustainability is making sure that we are holistically thinking about minimising the environmental impact in all areas of our company and product lifecycle.

And how do those values come to life at ASP?

We look at everything through the lens of sustainability - from design, manufacture, all the way to site. For example, our manufacturing plants in China use 100% hydroelectricity, and we make sure all our products have a high content of recycled materials. We're constantly designing and researching to learn how we can better the composition of panels, and maybe even come up with a totally new solution in time.

We also look at our transport and logistics. Wherever possible we aim to use rail instead of trucks, which significantly reduces our footprint. And we do that wherever we have distribution or transport requirements. We look at waste minimization both in the products manufacture and also on site.

We ensure all our products including the steel, the cement core, even the pallets that we are using, have a high recycled content. Our standard flooring system, Icon X, contains 98% recycled content.

We are now utilizing the LCAs we’ve conducted on our products further, producing Environmental Product Declarations and Climate Declarations. We also now offer our clients the option of having fully carbon neutral access floor system on their project. We offered this on the Barangaroo International Towers, offsetting over 300,000 square metres of access flooring. So that was quite exciting.

Do you feel like the industry has more of a carbon neutrality and sustainability focus now than in the past?

I think particularly for the larger contractors that’s true. It's slowly filtering down into the smaller head contractors now as well. But I think the major head contractors, like LendLease, are really driving that in the industry. I think more education on sustainability and carbon neutrality is the key.

Find out more about ASP Access Floors here.