How the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2024–2025 Helps the Flooring Industry

Richard Catt, CFA CEO, discusses how the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2024–2025 is helping to educate the flooring industry on sustainability news with a practical emphasis on how to become more environmentally friendly, and shows the companies leading the way in sustainable flooring design.

The CFA’s digital Guide to Sustainability 2024–2025, our annual update that highlights key information, includes products, and services, with a few case studies for good measure. Launched earlier in June, it aims to help anyone with a current flooring project (with sustainability at its heart) to deliver best practice. At the same time, it provides some thought leadership pieces around the future of sustainability in the commercial flooring sector.

Don’t forget the Guide is being heavily promoted to architects and designers, and so all of the content will have a wide reach and audience. Thank you to everyone who contributed as it’s obvious the CFA Guide to Sustainability is becoming more and more important as a reference document for our sector. Like our CFA Training Guide, the CFA Guide to Sustainability brings many of the important concepts together in one volume.

It’s difficult to put an exact figure on it, but I am increasingly aware of the amount of time I spend responding to emails, developing content, and supporting members in relation to sustainability. If asked to explain what sustainability means for the flooring sector, there are many entry points. It is a huge subject area and that strikes me whenever I undertake some work.

Returning to its roots as a guide, there is a very practical article on ways that contractors can improve their green credentials outside of installing sustainable products. A whole list of accessible actions and improvements that make both environmental and business sense. Doing the right thing, whilst at the same time making a flooring contractor more attractive as a supply chain partner to work with.

Included in the Guide is an update on the CISUFLO project https://www.cisuflo.eu/. Our work has really begun to gain momentum and we are supporting trials of a circular broadloom carpet. It’s an incredibly interesting project that has many threads including design for circular products and tagging materials so that they can be identified at the end of life and recycled. Tagging concepts have included bar codes and other electronic tags read by scanning the floor with something such as an RFID reader that will provide data such as the manufacturer, design and how they can be recycled. A product passport if you like.

Perhaps obvious to others, but a thread running through all this for me is the need for collaboration. There is a huge amount of work to do, and to drive it forward within a sensible timeframe, and with significant impact, we need to accelerate collaboration. Clearly sustainability already offers a competitive advantage for those that individually engage, and there are excellent examples in the guide of some cross industry collaboration and recycling schemes. In my opinion, identifying more key areas that ideally need more collective work is now fairly critical to avoid Government intervention towards net zero by 2050.

Recommendations will of course be included in the final CISUFLO reports that we will help disseminate in 2025. I wonder if product tagging is another area where industry collaboration/standards would be ideal? End of use for legacy materials, collection schemes on sites and logistics would all seem like areas where industry should ideally come together and develop ideas through something like the CFA manufacturers and distributors committee.

If you are looking for evidence of this in practice, to the benefit of the whole sector, just consider the work that the CFA has facilitated for many years in terms of installation standards. Those will probably need changing too! This is all food for thought and lots of reasons to have a look at the CFA’s Guide to Sustainability 2024–2025 to find out what’s on offer now, and what others in the industry believe are the key issues to address going forward. The CFA is a leading trade association representing the flooring Industry.  If you would like further information about our work on sustainability, follow the links opposite. Or if you would like an application pack outlining the benefits of membership, please contact the CFA offices on 0115 941 1126, email info@cfa.org.uk or apply online at www.cfa.org.uk.