Q&A with Lachlan McMurtrie, General Counsel & Chief Sustainability Officer at GH Commercial

With a dedicated focus on quality, and an unwavering commitment to doing things better, GH Commercial has long been a shining light when it comes to advancing sustainable practices and products in commercial flooring. Here, we talk to Lachlan McMurtrie about where GH Commercial is now, where they’re headed – and why their sustainable goals are always firmly grounded in reality. 

Congratulations on your new role, Lachlan. Tell us about your transition into your role as Chief Sustainability Officer. 

I have a background in both science and law, so with the rapidly increasing regulatory obligations in the sustainability space, it was a natural step to pick up responsibility for Sustainability in addition to my role as General Counsel.

Even before taking on Sustainability, I was very involved in how we communicate sustainability attributes to ensure we provide the design community with clear, accurate and transparent information about our products.

Recently, in renovating my own house I’ve discovered that many organisations don’t have a lot of substance behind their claims to being sustainable. Taking real and meaningful action and being accurate and transparent in how we communicate with our stakeholders about sustainability is something that I personally – and GH Commercial as an organisation – is really committed to. 

In your journey of leading sustainability at GH Commercial, what are some of the most surprising or unexpected things you’ve learned or discovered? 

Probably just how easy it is to make the wrong choice when trying to choose a more sustainable option. Pretty much everyone does it – even the experts. We tend to make our assessment of how sustainable a product is based on heuristics and get misled by our biases. We can get sucked in by stories that confirm our preconceptions rather than delving into the details and the science.

What that means for us at GH Commercial is that we need to be really direct and clear about our impacts and how we’re managing them. And part of that is better explaining the big progress we’ve made on our journey and how we have often taken more meaningful action than our competitors. 

What are the key priorities and strategic directions you are focusing on as CSO to further advance GH Commercial’s sustainability leadership in the flooring industry?

Climate is critical. While it’s not the only issue, for me it’s the biggest sustainability issue in part because of the flow-on effects of making insufficient progress. That’s why GH Commercial is committed to contributing to our group target of a 42% reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030. A target we’re well on track to meeting, having cut those emissions by 37% since 2020.

The other big-ticket item for me is product circularity, waste and end-of-life options. Some of those are tricky issues to solve. We’ve made good progress on managing our waste including recycling post-industrial waste and investigating ways to increase recycled content, but we’ve got more work to do on end-of-life options. That is a particularly tricky issue to solve in a smaller market like Australia and New Zealand, where it’s harder to get the scale necessary for commercially viable carpet recycling. That said, we’ve made some good steps in the right direction there with our Loop and ReCover programs that reuse and recycle carpet tiles – I see our challenge there as being to really ramp up those activities and make a greater contribution to the circular economy and managing our planet’s precious resources from cradle to cradle. 

GH Commercial has recently published its first EPD – congratulations! Could you briefly explain what this EPD signifies for GH Commercial and your journey towards understanding and reducing carbon emissions? 

Thanks! It's a real credit to our environmental engineers, and a great milestone. It’s a really important part of our commitment to providing the design community and our clients with greater product transparency.

For our local product development and manufacturing teams at GH Commercial, it’s a really important tool for managing our footprint. It’s the old axiom that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So, armed with this better understanding of the carbon emissions associated with our products, we intend to use that information to look at ways to further reduce our embodied carbon. It also allows us to offer carbon neutral products where that’s something our clients are looking for.

Beyond circularity and carbon reduction, what do you see as some of the other most pressing, yet perhaps often overlooked, sustainability challenges or opportunities facing the flooring industry and the wider interior design and built environment sectors today?

I would say product longevity and quality are things that are sometimes overlooked in terms of their sustainability impact. I’ve got a pair of shoes that I bought when I lived in London: they seemed expensive at the time, but I bought them in 2013 and am still wearing them today because they are really well made and able to be refurbished; they’re about as far from fast fashion as you can get.

At GH Commercial, our carpet tiles and broadloom products are made to exacting quality control measures by skilled workers in Australia. They’re a really well-made, quality product with local product support. People are often surprised when they hear that we’re one of a small number of local manufacturers.

Looking ahead, what are some of the most exciting or promising innovations you see emerging in sustainable flooring materials, design, or manufacturing that you believe will significantly impact the interior design and construction industries in the coming years? One of the continuing themes we’ve seen is a focus on how buildings do or don’t contribute to our wellbeing. That’s certainly a trend that we think is going to continue and that we’re focussed on.

Whether it’s quality materials and manufacture, natural tones and biophilic design or simply the knowledge that the product was locally made, flooring has a big role to play in that space. Flooring can play a big role in air quality, temperature control and acoustics, all of which play a part in creating spaces that focus on putting people at the centre of design. 

GH Commercial emphasises collaboration in your sustainability approach. Could you share some examples of key collaborations or partnerships GH Commercial is currently engaged in to promote sustainability within the flooring industry or across the broader supply chain? 

We work closely with all our suppliers, and that is only going to increase in coming years. We all know that to fully embrace sustainability, we need to understand and manage our impacts both where we operate and in our supply chain. 

For climate and managing embodied carbon in particular we need to have our suppliers work with us to better understand and manage the emissions associated with raw materials.

For circularity, our suppliers also potentially become customers for our manufacturing waste and products at the end of their life. But more likely is that a range of parties will need to cooperate to create a circular economy for flooring. In the R&D phase, collaboration will be essential to identifying, testing and scaling recycling solutions. And once solutions are identified, it seems likely that these will involve cross industry collaboration. By way of example, some of the promising uses of post-industrial and end-of-life carpet waste that GH Commercial has collaborated on involve other building products like insulation and concrete.

Finally, from a personal perspective, what inspires you most about working in sustainability within the flooring industry? And what are you most passionate about achieving in your role as Chief Sustainability Officer at GH Commercial? 

This year is the 160th anniversary of the founding of Godfrey Hirst in Geelong, where GH Commercial soft flooring is made today by a dedicated and loyal local workforce. That is an incredible legacy and responsibility that makes how we approach sustainability just that little bit more relevant. We’re focussed on ensuring that GH Commercial continues on its journey to become a more sustainable organisation in order to both preserve and build on that legacy – to meet the needs of our clients today without compromising those of future generations.