SUSTAINABLE
LAMINATE FLOORING
Quick-Step laminate flooring: built on a core of sustainability
As the European frontrunner in laminate flooring, we consider it our duty to produce our floors in the most sustainable way possible. That’s why we only use recovered wood from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources to satisfy our hunger for innovative design and natural beauty.
Careful with wood
Safely storing CO2
As a renewable resource, trees play a crucial role in combating climate change. They absorb CO2 and store it safely for the rest of their lives. Even when the wood is used – in a laminate floor, for instance – the CO2 remains captured. That’s why we avoid incineration, which releases the CO2 again, for as long as possible – hence your floor’s lifelong warranty of up to 25 years.
A second life for wood
Trees also stimulate biodiversity, providing food and shelter for animals. That's another reason why the high-density wood fibreboard in the core of our laminate contains only recovered wood. This is wood collected from sawmills, forest management processes, roadside maintenance … that would otherwise be burned or discarded. So instead of harvesting new trees, we only use wood by-products.
PEFC certified
Our laminate floors carry the PEFC label – together with FSC, the most trusted certificate in sustainable sourcing. This guarantees our recovered wood comes from sustainably managed forests or controlled sources, protecting primeval forests and preventing illegal logging with a risk analysis. That way, we’re sure our wood sourcing doesn’t contribute to deforestation.
We’re aiming for 100%-PEFC or FSC-labelled products by 2027.
Clean indoor air
Highly controlled production
Most of your life takes place indoors, which is why the air quality in your home is so vitally important. Many factors have an effect on it: ventilation, candles, cleaning agents, and even the materials used in your interior, such as the flooring. We minimise the emissions of harmful substances by producing your flooring in-house as much as possible. This means we know exactly what materials it contains, and we make sure you can install it without any adhesive products.
Minimal VOC emission
Thanks to our in-house production, we manage to minimise the emission of VOCs or volatile organic compounds: organic chemicals that have a high vapour pressure at room temperature. One example is formaldehyde and is for example also emitted by wood. The formaldehyde emission of our laminate flooring is negligible and 10 times lower than the EU restrictions, making it perfectly safe for you and your family. As such, the emission of our floors is comparable to the emission of natural wood, which is why we have received the M1 and A+ labels.
Powered by green energy
Fixing our own heat
Our in-house wood waste that can’t be reused in laminate flooring gets a new lease on life in the form of green energy. The wood dust resulting from the sawing and sanding of our boards, for instance, is too fine to be recycled, but it still offers a suitable heat source for our tumble dryers and presses. 70% of the heat requirements of our laminate and vinyl production is covered by green energy.
Efforts on group level
But we go further than that. Unilin – the group behind Quick-Step – has invested in two biomass plants to convert wood dust and non-recyclable wood waste into green energy. This energy serves our own production processes – what’s left is made publicly available. Furthermore, we rely on energy from windmills and solar panels. As a result, about half of our group’s production is powered by renewable energy today.
By using green energy,
we avoided more than 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emission in 2020.
Compliant with stringent standards
European frontrunner
Did you know that we were the very first manufacturer of laminate flooring products to receive the EU Ecolabel? The European Union only awards the Ecolabel to products and services that meet the highest environmental standards throughout their lifecycles.
Keep improving
To minimise the environmental impact of your laminate flooring, we use lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology to calculate where in our products’ lifecycles we can improve. This results in an environmental product declaration (EPD), which we meticulously follow.
The following labels demonstrate that your flooring complies with some of the strictest environmental and health standards:
-
A+
-
M1
-
PEFC
-
EU Ecolabel
-
EPD
-
Nordic Swan Ecolabel
