Mannington Commercial has Newly Launched its Vinyl Free Commercial LVT Proxy Collection
Mannington has Launched its Proxy Vinyl Free Commercial LVT Collection
This month Mannington Commercial has launched its first vinyl free commercial LVT product collection. This is the first non-PVC resilient plank flooring collection the brand has launched and is designed to target commercial properties, building projects and multi-family residentials with better environmental impacts. The Proxy LVT collection is Declare Red List Free and has a 105 percent carbon offset in cradle to gate.
Proxy Vinyl Free Commercial LVT Product Specifications
This Proxy commercial LVT collection is built with 2.5mm base layer thickness with 0.5mm/20mil top wear layer. Given the 0.5mm wear layer it is able to handle heavy traffic use in commercial applications. As the Proxy collection are available in both stone and wood pattern styles, there are two size available in this LVT collection, mainly the 7.25″ x 48″ size for wood styles and 18″ x 18″ for stone styles.
Proxy Vinyl Free Commercial LVT Color Selections
The Mega Trend Towards Environmental Sustainability
The global market is gradually moving into a trend that aligns with many environmental concern topics by NGO and Regulatory Body Entities. Noticeably for the Floor Covering and Flooring Industry the concerns has been focused in the material applications as well as manufacturing carbon footprints.
Our observation from what and how the major brands are doing is to implement this trend where sustainable manufacturing and Product Life Cycle are being assessed.
From the marketier strategy we observe from Mannington Commercial, the future trend for Flooring Brands will include the following:
- Toxic Free Product & Toxic Free Manufacturing
- Improving End-Of-Life Product Impact with improving recyclability
- Reduce Carbon Foot Print in both Product and Manufacturing Practice
Why Vinyl Free is the Solution to Better Environmental Sustainability?
The use of PVC materials as building materials and floor coverings has long been debated on its environmental concerns over recyclability and toxicity. In the past, major flooring brands (and nearly all of them), has market PVC material as an environmental products as during the manufacturing process it does not need to apply glue that contain high concentration of formaldehyde.
The brands also claim that PVC floorings are 100% recyclable, however they did not mention about the fact that PVC polymers can only be recycled through chemical processing, which during the recycling process need to add more dioxins. The chemical process also require high energy use which both makes PVC Flooring recycling not exactly environmental. Another concern about PVC vinyl floorings is when it is burnt, it produce a black smoke fume which also contains dioxin, and PVC that is dumped in landfill are also found plasticizers leached into the ground.
With such negative environmental impact and recycling challenges, Zerowaste Europe has proposed recommendation to fully ban the use of PVC by 2030. The need for Vinyl-Free or Non-PVC based material is needed as an alternative solution to current LVT / SPC products.
Directions for Vinyl Free LVT / SPC Development
From our article on Observation from Domotex Asia Chinafloor Expo, we have outlined that the mega trend in vinyl free resilient floorings falls in two direction. One with the Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) and the other with Polypropylene (PP) polymers. The Mannington’s Proxy Vinyl Free Commercial LVT is engineered with formulated PET composite.
With COREtec and Mannington already launching their vinyl free LVT floorings, we will soon begin to see both PP-based LVT and PET-Based LVT being launched into the market.
