Tips for Healthy and Sustainable Hotel Flooring
In celebration of Earth Day, we’re highlighting the hard work Tarkett—an Innvision flooring partner—does to ensure their carpeting, tiles, laminates, and other products are healthy and sustainable for the environment.
The Case for Healthy Flooring
When guests visit and staff members work at your hotel, they trust you will provide a safe environment that doesn’t negatively affect their health. Unfortunately, some flooring contains harmful chemicals that impact air quality and make their way into people’s lungs. These chemicals are “forever chemicals” because they never disappear.
How to Determine Healthy Flooring
To avoid harmful chemicals in your flooring, look for GREENGUARD Certified products. This certification is for products that “are scientifically proven to meet some of the world’s most rigorous third-party chemical emissions standards, helping to reduce indoor air pollution and the risk of chemical exposure.”
For hard surfaces, you can also look for the Asthma and Allergy Friendly® certification, which considers materials used in the flooring and installation and VOC levels after installation.
Two big chemicals to avoid are ortho-phthalates in hard flooring and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in carpeting, which create a level of stain resistance. If nothing else, ask your flooring manufacturer if these chemicals are used in their products.
Sustainable Flooring
Third-party verifiers research vendors’ environmental impact, assessing their facilities, chemical usage, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, and end-of-use plans so you don’t have to.
Cradle to Cradle is the top-of-the-line certification, although they do not certify PVC products. Most Tarkett flooring is Cradle to Cradle Certified®, and they internally filter their PVC products through the same guidelines. Also look for Affirm™ certified hotel furnishings, which must meet environmental, health and wellness, and social impact requirements.
Sustainability in Hotel Marketing
Guests care about the environment and sustainability. The world’s climate issues, carbon emissions, and waste disposal issues are no secret, and people are waking up to the fact that to help our planet, we all need to make an effort. In addition, consumers want to support businesses that have sustainability practices in place, so it’s helpful to showcase the steps you take to put your guests and the planet first.
During a hotel renovation, there are old products and waste materials needing disposal. To mitigate this, instead of hauling used flooring to a landfill, Tarkett has a program where they’ll take your old carpet and re-use or recycle it. Often, this is cheaper than taking it to the dump, and the products will get a second life!
With this service, you could save money and prevent tons of waste from going to a landfill. You also get an opportunity to share this fact with prospective guests in your marketing. They’ll love hearing how you saved tons of material from the landfill, and they’ll be eager to support a sustainability-minded business. You can also highlight your products’ certifications, so they know you’ve got their health and safety top of mind.
Innvision greatly values its longstanding partnerships with excellent manufacturers such as Tarkett. They value sustainability and work with us to find our client’s perfect intersection of flooring style, quality, and durability at the right price point. We’re committed to sustainability and constantly look for ways to lessen our impact on the environment.
At Innvision, we help our clients find the best products for their hotel FF&E needs from our carefully curated vendor list built through research and experience. We only recommend vendors that follow industry standards, offer a warranty, actively manage quality control, and have a history of delivering products on time. To learn more about how Innvision can help you select healthy and sustainable products for your next hotel project, reach out!
