Tag Archives: life cycle assessment

As a sustainability specialist, I often find myself giving presentations on how to choose environmentally-responsible finishes, including carpet. At some point, I like to ask my audience, “Where does carpet come from?” I push until someone nails the answer: oil. (Or, as I like to show in my slides, plastic sheep!)

Looking at the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) footprint of carpet tile, extracting and processing oil to create nylon dominates the environmental impacts. When we tally and analyze the environmental impacts from every phase of a carpet tile’s life (raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, installation and use, transportation, and end of life recycling or disposal), the majority of impacts occur in that first phase of turning oil into nylon. In fact, our 3rd party verified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD®) confirms our own LCA, showing how across all environmental impact categories, more than 60% of the impacts occur in the extraction of raw materials.

What does this mean to a company like InterfaceFLOR? It means that using oil to make nylon is unsustainable. Not just because of the LCA footprint, but also because oil is a non-renewable resource and creates social, environmental, and financial instability. We know that we can’t continue along our society’s status quo of take-make-waste, and knowing which of our raw materials is doing the most damage means knowing which raw material we need to replace. To meet our Mission Zero™ goal, we must replace virgin nylon with a renewable resource.

For years, InterfaceFLOR has been working towards completely closing the loop on our carpet tile backing, but the missing link was how to recycle nylon, at least until 2007…

In 2007, InterfaceFLOR cracked the nut by uncovering a method to cleanly separate the carpet nylon from the backing, allowing us to introduce the first post-consumer content type 6,6 nylon carpet tile in the world. In 2009, we introduced post-consumer content type 6 nylon. We use this recycled fiber as a raw material to make our Convert™ carpet tile designs. The styles in the Convert Platform contain a total of 64-73% recycled content including 32-35% post-consumer recycled content (as of September 2009). Check out our EPD for 3rd-party verification of the reduced environmental impacts associated with these products.

InterfaceFLOR invested in an entire system that addresses both the raw material impacts as well as the end of life impacts of our products. Our recycled content isn’t from another industry; it’s drawing from our own history of products that we (and our competitors) made in years past. Using our own product as a raw material for making new product is a major breakthrough for us and the carpet industry. This is what “closing the loop” is truly about, and it moves us closer to our goal of getting off oil.

Lindsay James

Director of Strategic Sustainability