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Slideshow:
Looming Beauty
Photo courtesy of Interface.
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California
Gold
Successes and Pitfalls
"A lot of people got upset when the standard came out for
procurement guidelines because it's hard to meet them at this time," said
Paul Firth, manager of environmental initiatives for Interface, "but the
reality is that if we didn't have the government pushing us, the market
wouldn't move this quickly. When Interface started this process, there
were very few players in any industry going this direction. We didn't even
know what the process looked like."
Innovation led to what Firth calls "great successes and great pitfalls. We
had some products we were attempting to make that we thought would be a
great successes." A hybrid between a floor and a carpet is an example.
"We spent a lot of time and effort developing it and it turned out not to
be workable. But it helped forward the internal innovations and led to
some really good products." Among them are "merge-able dye lots," which
eliminate the problem of color matching in carpets when partial
replacements are required at a later date. Another innovation was in the
patterns of carpet tiles – creating random patterns eliminated the need
and expense of matching patterns in tiles.
At C & A, a division of Tandus, there are three products currently going
for California Gold certification. One is made from the recycled polyvinyl
butyral (PVB) film in shatterproof windshields and safety glass. "It's
been recycled it for years," she says, "but there hasn't been of an
application for it. We were the first to create a carpet backing made of
the recycled glass." She says about one-third to one-half of the
company's products meet environmentally preferable purchasing criteria.
Another of C & A's initiatives converts old carpet into new carpet backing
in what they call a "true closed-loop recycling system." In this way 100
percent of reclaimed materials will never be placed in a landfill or
incinerator.
"Most people identify sustainability with the environment side," says
Firth, "but there is an economic side also. Are you a viable business and
succeeding as a business, making a profit? That factor can change wildly
depending on market forces. In the late 90's, in order to be a sustainable
company, you had to spend a lot of money and see no profit. Now we've seen
that's no longer the case."
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