Adairsville, Ga.—In order to continuously improve the sustainability of its products, CFL Flooring has undergone a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to assess the environmental impact of a product throughout its lifecycle, from extraction of raw materials through its manufacturing up to its end of life, enabling the company to issue Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for its rigid core floors.
“Sustainability within CFL is one of the utmost important objectives throughout our innovation efforts,” said Thomas Baert, president and co-founder of CFL. “Measuring progress and making it transparent is key to push that progress forward.”
Such analysis helps set a baseline and identify areas of potential improvement:
- Selecting materials that respect health and the environment and with lower greenhouse gas emissions throughout its life cycle
- Promoting optimized use of resources in production
- Setting up manufacturing closer to the market
- Creating new sustainable technologies that allow the company to reduce the use of materials or improve its transportation-related GHG emissions
“Generating the LCA data allows us to also develop EPDs —transparent and objective reports that communicate how a product impacts the environment across its entire life cycle,” said Konstantin Mishagin, CFL director of product management and sustainability. “We see a rapidly growing global demand for quantitative environmental information, especially in the building materials market segment, in particular because it enables our clients to earn credits for sustainable building labels, such as LEED, BREEAM, DGNB and others.”