Sustainability is now well and truly something that needs to be considered for any new building: domestic or commercial. And as of July last year, the process of ensuring that your floor is as environmentally friendly as possible has become a whole lot easier.
It was at this time that the GBCA (Green Building Council of Australia) started to recognise third party certification schemes, including from GECA (Good Environmental Choice Australia), EcoSpecifier and the Carpet Institute of Australia.
“Rather than select a single prod uct certification scheme, which was GECA, we recognised that it would be better if there were other product certification schemes out there that were recognised as well. So we needed to develop a transparent way of comparing different product certi fication schemes so that we could recognise them in accordance with the outcomes that they're achieving,” says Andrew Aitken, executive direc tor of Green Star at the GBCA.
These changes were very welcome at Polyflor, which supplies environ mentally friendly commercial and domestic vinyl flooring in Australia and New Zealand. Recognising EcoSpecifier as an accreditor meant Polyflor’s products could now also be recognised by the GBCA.
“So as soon as these changes were made, all PVC-based products finally became environmentally friendly, we just needed to go get the certifica tion,” said Peter Bates, marketing manager at Polyflor. “Prior to that we couldn’t get the certification.”
Polyflor focuses on whole of life cycle analysis in order to ensure its products are as sustainable as possible.
Bates argues that 80 per cent of a floor’s impact is when it’s in situ, so how Polyflor’s products can be cleaned and maintained is of upmost importance. “[Our products] have polyurethane on the surface and embedded within them and that makes them very easy to keep clean, and we recommend environmentally friendly chemicals combined with micro-fibre technology,” he said.
Polyflor is also the first vinyl flooring organisation to have its own take-back scheme in Australia.
“It’s called Recofloor ... We have recycle bins in all our warehouses and in our larger installer warehouses and we also put recycle bins out on project job sites, because, for instance, if you’re doing a hospital, there can be up to 10 per cent wastage and if you’re doing a hospi tal that has 50,000sqm, 10 per cent wastage can be a lot, so we take that back and recycle it back into our manufacturing process.”
All of Boral Timber's flooring prod ucts are certified by the Australian Forestry Standard (AFS), and according to Stephen Dadd, general manager Hardwood, Boral, the process of becoming accredited is a very thorough, trustworthy one.
“First of all you have to demon strate that you can track the timber back to its source, so any timber floor that someone would buy from us, for example, we can track the pack history all the way back to the particular piece of bush that that timber came from and in doing so there’s an assurance that that timber is not illegally logged, that it’s subject to all the protocols around flora and fauna studies and that it’s logged in a sustainable [way],” he says.
The Boral factories and warehouses also had to be audited to make sure that there was no chance that tim bers could get mixed up, and to ensure that the integrity of the order trail can be maintained.
Dadd adds that the company has also made moves to ensure that the right timbers are being used for the right purposes. He says that the focus for Boral Timber has shifted from structural products towards decora tive products, because previously, when sustainability wasn't such a con cern, good hardwoods were being wasted in applications that could have been filled by other products.
“Probably more than 80 per cent of our business is purely decorative: flooring, high-end exposed beams, internal structures, decking, those sort of products. We’ve invested a lot over the years in shifting the produc tion process towards those more highly valued products and that’s one element of sustainability,” he says.
“If we’re going to cut down a tree, a native tree, we really owe it to the tree to put it into a high valued product.”
GEO Flooring is an Australian commercial flooring company, pro viding sustainable flooring for hos pitals, aged care, education and corporate retail.
It, like Polyflor, believes that sus tainability is about more than just what the flooring product is made out of. “Very high on our agenda of reviewing products is the longevity of the product. I don’t believe in the modern mentality of something being a throw-away item,” says Andrew Arnott, managing director at GEO Flooring.
“We have a carpet tile which has a 31 per cent post-consumer recycle content as a standard offering. To my knowledge, I don’t think that there are too many other carpet importers or producers in Australia offering something like that.”
GEO Flooring works with commercial buildings and Arnott has noticed that rubber is really starting to make a name for itself in the sustainable flooring industry. He says that there are two rubber flooring products on the market: natural rubber and a synthetic or commercial rubber. The latter is a by-product of the petrochemical industry.
“So in essence you could argue it’s a post-industrial by-product of the petrochemical industry. One of the issues with rubber is its low maintenance. You don’t need any chemicals, which as we all know, are not good for the environment. Two: the life-span is second to none.”
Arnott adds that industries such as health care are looking for alternatives to PVC, which isn’t as easy to clean and is more absorbent than rubber.
“We’re getting a lot of interest because people are looking for alternatives to PVC and a lot of people were going with linoleum which is a non-PVC substrate as well, but what they’ve worked out is that linoleum is no good in an environment that is going to be constantly wet such as in a healthcare environment. And it also has extremely high maintenance because in essence it is paper, so it’s very absorbent, so you have to keep the surface treated to stop it absorbing stuff, whereas rubber is completely the opposite.”
Since July, sustainable flooring products have been in the spotlight, not just in terms of how they’re made and what they’re made from, but flooring companies, distributors and consumers are all more aware of how, on a more long term basis, they can further reduce the environ mental impact of their flooring.
“We’re dedicated to offering fit- for-purpose environmentally friend ly products,” Arnott says. “We look at products that are going to last.”
