Beth Robinson

I kept my eye out for "green" as I walked the booths at Surfaces and it was everywhere. This company and that company had something that was supposed to be environmentally friendly. (We were no exception.)

Types of Potentially Green Flooring

Exotic hardwood flooring companies were explaining how they were responsible, only harvesting already fallen trees.

Engineered hardwood floors, which are something like plywood, let the manufacturers create four times as many planks from each tree than you can be made if you use solid boards.

Bamboo flooring talks about how the bamboo grows quickly, and is therefore more renewable than trees, but there can be issues with how it is harvested and processed.

One innovative company was selling "Woodboo," which seemed a truly silly name, but used bamboo for the under portions of the engineered plank and real wood for only the top layer.

Many of the vinyl and linoleum flooring pieces contained substantial amounts of recycled content.

Some of the adhesives made to glue down these floors are VOC free or solvent free. Some of the coatings and treatments are likewise greener than they were previously.

Ceramic tile is made from, well, dirt, which is common, but only a few companies have figured out how to recycle it.

Vinyl tiles and sheets can be made to contain significant amounts of recycled content.

Some brands of nylon-based carpet have received cradle to cradle certifications and are completely recycled - gathered at the waste end, broken down into their chemical components, and made into new fibers and carpets at the other ends.

Support for Sustainability

The show sponsors were also supporting the concept of going green by having one of the four free speaking platforms on the show floor be themed for sustainability.

I listened to two of the presentations, one on Selling Sustainability to Customers by David Wilkerson of Shaw Industries and one on How Retailers can Incorporate Sustainability into their Businesses by Jenny Cross of Mohawk.

One really amazing point was that while roughly 10% of your customers will always buy green and 10% will never buy green, the other 80% are interested in green if you mention it to them and can present it alongside the usual characteristics of design, quality, and value. This is especially true if you can tie support for the environment to their own happiness and that of their families.