SUSTAINABILITY MARCELO MARTINS MEIRA – EMEA SUSTAINABILITY MANAGER, TARKETT, FRANCE
Sustainable flooring in hospitals: it all adds up
Marcelo Martins Meira, EMEA sustainability manager at Tarkett, explains how the choice of flooring in a hospital can help us take further steps to reducing carbon emissions.
Sustainability and eco- responsibility have become requirements when designing a hospital. Much is delivered through technical specifications, certification and regulation. But, with increasingly sophisticated measurement and demanding reporting, healthcare facility operators need to identify every possible lever to reduce the CO2
footprint of buildings
and improve their overall sustainability. This applies both in construction and in operation throughout the building’s life.
In this article we look at
how one seemingly modest part of a healthcare building, namely its flooring, can contribute to reducing carbon emissions. We also touch on other sustainability drivers particularly relevant to flooring in a healthcare setting.
Beneath the feet Flooring is easily overlooked as a source of CO2
savings. This is hardly surprising
given that floor finishes account for less than 10 per cent of the embodied CO2 emissions1
of a healthcare building,
currently estimated at 1,000 kg eq. CO2
/m2
across its whole lifecycle.2 But on the basis that every saving
helps, we have, for a long time, focused heavily on the carbon impact of our products. This has entailed recognising
Maintenance
that the total carbon footprint comes not just from manufacturing, but also from the products once they have left the factory and are in a customer’s building, as well as from their eventual disposal. Flooring may be under your feet, but it can make a significant contribution to carbon neutrality throughout its lifecycle.
Crucial factors to consider in looking for low-carbon flooring Six factors are seen as critical in the CO2 impact of flooring through its life. Key elements of each factor are: l Design: adopting sustainability principles at product-concept stage.
Marcelo Martins Meira
Marcelo Martins Meira has over eight years of experience in sustainability and corporate social responsibility in Latin America and Europe in building materials and chemical
companies such as Saint-Gobain, BASF, and Tarkett. He gained strong technical expertise on Green Building Certification
Systems and Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) from his previous position at Artelia, one of Europe’s leading engineering firms.
Marcelo is an international BREEAM assessor for projects such as new constructions, refurbishments, and interior design.
IFHE DIGEST 2023 End of life
Product durability
Design
l Manufacture: reducing carbon emissions during production.
l Product durability: minimising replacements.
Manufacturer’s policy
Manufacture
l Maintenance: can account for up to 80 per cent of a floor’s carbon footprint, so should be kept to a minimum.
l Recycling: planning for a product’s end of life.
l Manufacturer’s policy: long- term commitment to a circular economy, with transparency and certification.
We discuss each of these in more detail below.
Design
Design is the first critical step on which many of the factors
depend. A smaller carbon footprint has to be designed in from the outset. Good guidance is enshrined in the Cradle to Cradle principles, which focus on keeping all materials in use for as long as possible and transforming them into new ones when products reach end of life. Such principles should be adopted, recorded and enforced by your flooring supplier. Material choice is a key part of
sustainable design. There are two elements to this: l Increasing the use of recycled materials.
l Using materials that are themselves recyclable.
Material choice largely determines the ability to recover, recycle, and transform old products into new ones, but it is important also to promote the practice of using already-recycled materials where possible. These are less energy-intensive than extracting and transforming virgin materials. For example, we aim to reach 30 per cent of recycled content for all purchased raw materials by 2030. Commitment to good materials should include eliminating any controversial
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