CFL Flooring has conducted its first Life Cycle Assessment for all its rigid core products produced in its headquarter facilities. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a process of evaluating the effects that a product has on the environment over the entire period of its life, thereby increasing resource-use efficiency and decreasing liabilities. 

"We see Life Cycle Analysis as a critical tool to assess the environmental impact of a product using standardized methods (ISO 14040 and ISO 14044), tracing the impact throughout its lifecycle—from extraction of raw materials through its manufacturing up to its end-of-life, including transportation, use, and maintenance", said Konstantin Mishagin, director of product management and sustainability, CFL Flooring.

CFL said the LCA will help the company identify key areas for potential improvement such as:

• Selecting materials that have lower GHG emissions and that do not contribute to resource scarcity, for example abundant, recycled or renewable.
• Promoting optimized use of resources in our production, reducing the use of energy and water, and waste generation.
• Creating new sustainable technologies that allow us to reduce the use of materials or improve our transportation-related GHG emissions, for example, Be-Lite technology or the new digital printing product line coming in 2023. 
• Generating LCA data further enables CFL Flooring to also develop Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs)—transparent and objective reports that communicate how a product impacts the environment across its entire life cycle. 

"We see a rapidly growing global demand for quantitative environmental information, especially in the building materials market segment, in particular because it enables our clients to earn credits for sustainable building labels such as LEED, BREEAM, DGNB and others," said Thomas Baert, president of CFL Flooring.

For more information, visit cflflooring.com/.