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015 Zandur: sustainable flooring
81 Plays5 years ago
GUEST: ROBERT MCKEE / Founder, Zandur / www.zandur.com
HOST: MATT MORLEY / www.biofilico. com / www.biofit.io / www.bioblu.org
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to episode 15 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss sustainability and wellness in real estate and hospitality.
Meet the Host: Matt Morley
00:00:21
Speaker
I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of BioBlue Sustainability, biofilico wellness interiors, and biofit nature gyms.
Guest Spotlight: Robert McKee of Zandoor
00:00:30
Speaker
This episode, we're with Robert McKee, the dynamic founder of Zandoor Sustainable Flooring based in Virginia, USA, supplying hospitals, offices, gyms, and residential spaces around the world.
Impact of Flooring on Indoor Air Quality
00:00:44
Speaker
Flooring plays a fundamental part in creating a healthy indoor environment, particularly as it relates to indoor air quality. Now, more than ever, designers and architects are thinking about cleaning and hygiene, which is right in Sandor's bull park. So Robert talks us through the world of heavy, healthy product certifications, the many benefits of using cork as a raw material,
00:01:09
Speaker
why you do not want natural rubber in your floor covering but rather vulcanized rubber, the life cycle of flooring and the role of maintenance over what can be 30 years, as well as Zandal's really innovative approach to design that draws on inspiration often from craftsmen in the early 1900s. If you like this type of content please consider subscribing
00:01:33
Speaker
And you can of course find Zandor and the local distributors listed on their website, that's zandor.com.
Zandoor's History and Sustainability Commitment
00:01:40
Speaker
Nada Maas, here's Robert McKee. Robert, thank you so much for joining us today. I know you founded the company back in 2004. Could you give us a quick introduction to what Zandor flooring looks like today as a business, your products and perhaps where you manufacture all these flooring tiles? Well, sure. And I appreciate you.
00:02:03
Speaker
taking the time to speak with me. A little bit about the company. We did start in 2004. The objective of the company from the beginning has always been to focus on sustainable commercial products for the floor covering portion of construction and really with a focus of not selling something to be sustainable just to be sustainable but
00:02:31
Speaker
have sustainable products that really performed or outperformed other products in the industry that weren't necessarily sustainable. And also meeting the price points that were important. Our interest has never been to profit off of sustainability. It's always just to be sustainable because it's the right thing to do. And my family history goes back into the cork industry, cork flooring. Sustainability was not
00:03:00
Speaker
something that people even talked about you know back in my grandfather's era in the 40s and 50s but it's always been something that we have had in our in our product line and everything we've always sold has had that sustainability story before it became popular so it's something that we just continue with. You know I think that's something that really comes through in your communications online that that yeah it is
00:03:26
Speaker
a fundamental piece of what you do rather than an afterthought that you've sort of tacked on at the end. It feels like it's really, yes, you've built the business around that philosophy or that it's just part of how you see the world. And I think that there is a clear difference now in companies that
00:03:42
Speaker
that really have a value system behind them. And that was very much the sort of initial insight that kind of led me to the contact of you guys. So you have, I came across you primarily from the sport and fitness flooring and cork flooring, but you do others, you do commercial flooring as well, right?
Sustainable Product Offerings at Zandoor
00:04:00
Speaker
Correct. So basically, and just getting back real quick to what you've mentioned and kind of where we come from,
00:04:09
Speaker
a lot of temptation always for companies to go out and sell products just to sell products. For instance, we have plenty of opportunities to go and sell vinyl-based products, things of that nature. It's something from the beginning we've always made the point of we're going to focus on the sustainability side of things. We're not going to be tempted into having the non-sustainable products. You get into the shawls of the industry, the big guys, they have their sustainable lines and their non-sustainable lines. To me, it's like,
00:04:38
Speaker
It kind of defeats the whole purpose. Either we're all in or we're not. But getting back to the products that we have. We have three basic products. The first kind of our flagship product is something that we introduced way back when in the US. It's a product made of cork and rubber combined.
00:05:00
Speaker
Um, we've just recently made some significant improvements to that and switched to an all nitrile rubber based product, uh, which has great cleanability, which is obviously really important these days. Chemical resistance, um, slip resistance, all those sorts of things. Um, then we have, uh, our solid rubber product, uh, which is kind of the, uh, go to heavy duty type of a floor covering product for hospitals, airports, things of that nature.
00:05:29
Speaker
And then we have our solid cork flooring product, which has certain applications in commercial use as well as a lot of residential use as well.
00:05:42
Speaker
So then clearly the issue, not the issue, but I suppose like one of the ways, one of the interesting points is just how from the, let's call it an architect or an interior designer or design and build team who are spec'ing your flooring, how they can find their way through from these various different materials and what their sort of pros and cons are.
Certifications and Indoor Air Quality Strategy
00:06:02
Speaker
And one thing I've noticed is how you've really gone big on the
00:06:06
Speaker
Let's call them certifications, right? Where you lean on these systems that have a lot of scientific backing behind them. And for example, the idea of a declare label from the ILFI, International Living Future Institute and the Red List Free concept. Can you talk a bit about how you did that and what role those type of certifications or quality assurances play within your strategy?
00:06:34
Speaker
We've always been completely transparent about our products. Again, it goes back to the history of my family being involved in this business. It's just kind of how we're wired. You can see what we've
00:06:53
Speaker
What we participate in is these transparency programs. The challenge is for a small company is the cost of these programs, which can be a certain barrier to entry, whether intentional or not, I'm not sure. So we try to pick and choose what's gonna be most important, what's really gonna tell the story about our product to the specifiers, because ultimately that's what we're trying to do is to easily convey
00:07:23
Speaker
the sustainability story of our product in a completely transparent and honest way. Because that's what ultimately everyone else is looking for. It gets pretty challenging, I think, both on the supply side and the specification side. It's challenging for people to really understand even what they're looking at. And I find that with specifiers that
00:07:50
Speaker
have been doing this for a long time, get confused rightfully so on a lot of these things because there's so much information out there.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think we end up, we're looking for a quick and reliable route through in terms of digesting that information. And often, yeah, I could declare a label or a cradle-to-cradle certificate. It's just boom. You know once that's there, because of the integrity behind those systems, when a product comes out with that, you can just rely on it 100%. I think that's, and they're going to be increasingly important, I think,
00:08:26
Speaker
as the green building systems above start to require those individual green building products to align with their systems. You need everything to join up, a bit like a Tetris puzzle. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, and it's a big theme right now for obvious reasons, is indoor air quality. If you could just talk for a moment about how
00:08:49
Speaker
But obviously, how your products would, if you like, have a positive impact on that versus what flooring can do in a negative sense to negatively affect indoor air quality and how that works. Some people might not think about flooring as being something that would have a role to play in the air quality of an indoor space. Well, I think
00:09:18
Speaker
Just in a basic sense, floor covering can have definitely a negative effect on air quality. What you're looking for in the floor covering itself as a material would be something that has a neutral effect, that has no effect on air quality as far as anything negative.
00:09:37
Speaker
However, if you look at certain types of floor covering, if you look at soft surfaces, how cleanable are they? Because that's when you can start to obviously have a negative effect on air quality. So it's not necessarily the material itself, but it is what can get into the material, you know, dirt, dust, all those sorts of things that, you know, allergens, things of that nature, which can be contained in the floor covering itself.
Material Choices: Cork vs. Rubber
00:10:05
Speaker
And as I said, specifically in soft surfaces.
00:10:08
Speaker
Now, if you get into products, PVC products, things of that nature, certainly off-gassing is something that is important to pay attention to. And again, that's something that, you know, in the formulation of our products, we make sure that there is nothing that is going to cause any unsafe off-gassing of any chemicals, allergens, things of that nature. And it's always been one of those things that I've liked about pork in general.
00:10:36
Speaker
as a raw material is that it has a completely neutral effect on environments as far as there's no off-gassing with cork, there's no negative implications whatsoever. And it's something that's on the residential side, it's something that oftentimes has been used in the past for people that have certain allergies, things of that nature. And then talk about the cleanability of a product.
00:11:02
Speaker
If you look at a solid surface rubber flooring versus, let's say, recycled rubber flooring or something like that, the cleanability level of a solid, vulcanized surface is extremely important to indoor air quality and just health in general because it is a very cleanable surface.
00:11:25
Speaker
Okay, so let me ask you that one. That's an interesting one because that comes up a lot with my gym designs where I'll often, I'll see these terms banded around quite sort of loosely around eco-rubber flooring tiles and vulcanized rubber tiles. And I always think, gosh, what's the difference there? Is all rubber sustainable or is eco-rubber, is that more sustainable than recycled rubber? How do you see things there? Can you help us sort of unpick those ideas?
00:11:53
Speaker
So yeah, this is one of the challenges that a company like ourselves fights against because there's been so much marketing and continues to be marketing that's not necessarily straightforward, I guess I would say. So you have all rubber is vulcanized. Vulcanization is the process of curing the rubber basically through heat and pressure.
00:12:22
Speaker
So, but then you have what a lot of people refer to as recycled rubber flooring or crumb rubber flooring. And then what we have is what we refer to as vulcanized rubber flooring. And the reason we call it vulcanized is that it is a completely sealed, the vulcanization is the last process in the manufacturing of our material. So it leaves a completely sealed impenetrable surface.
00:12:50
Speaker
If you look at recycled rubber flooring or crumb rubber flooring, the rubber chips are vulcanized, but the last process in fact is actually they grind up those chips, then they put typically a urethane glue with them and then they cure them. So it's not the final process of recycled rubber flooring or crumb rubber is not vulcanization. It's actually just gluing those chips back together.
00:13:19
Speaker
And that's why, as a result, you end up with a surface that has a lot of pores in it and holes in it. You have to put finishes on it. You have off-gassing because you have some of those components being the recycled rubbers sometimes are not great. You don't know what the contents are.
00:13:38
Speaker
So I'm not sure, hopefully that clarifies it a bit.
Innovative Flooring Solutions
00:13:42
Speaker
That does, it does. And then you get into, and then one of your big innovations was then combining the rubber with the cork. So how does that process work? How do you blend or combine the two into one solid substance for your flaws? So I can't claim to be the ultimate inventor of that product. That was actually invented way back in the early 1900s.
00:14:08
Speaker
But and actually was used in the double decker buses in London was one of the original flooring materials for that. And it was actually I think kind of cork was used as a cheap filler for the product way back in the day. It's a product that I discovered probably 15 or so years ago. It was not being produced. It was not being used.
00:14:35
Speaker
and I thought it was a phenomenal idea to take basically all the great properties of cork being the sustainability, great acoustical properties, great comfort properties and mix those properties with the those of rubber which are phenomenal durability, give us a lot of options for color things of that nature and and as a result we've
00:14:59
Speaker
over time develop this product, which kind of takes the best of both worlds with rubber and with quirk and puts them together and gives us a really phenomenal product.
Material Sourcing and Lifecycle Considerations
00:15:10
Speaker
And when I think of cork, I guess, I think of like the big cork nations, I suppose, yeah, Spain, Portugal, but and then and then rubber is rubber. Does it have a typical geographic denomination of the certain areas of the world where it's more typical, less typical? And then are you sourcing from all over the world, bring it into the US manufacturing there and then shipping away from from your base? Is that how it works? So so floor covering in general is not made from
00:15:40
Speaker
Natural rubber in fact, you really don't want natural rubber in your floor covering for a variety of reasons and that this is one of the misconceptions that that we don't Go out and sell that our products made with natural rubber because it's not The reason you don't want natural rubber in your product is because you have a very strong odor from natural rubber which
00:16:07
Speaker
Most people have smelled from erasers or whatever the case may be. That odor is from a protein that is active in that natural rubber and can also cause allergies as well, latex. Latex allergies, that's from natural rubber. You certainly don't want that in a healthcare situation. Natural rubber has very inconsistent coloring, so color consistency is difficult, which is obviously important for design.
00:16:35
Speaker
It also has very poor aging characteristics. If you've seen a dry rotted tire in the past on a bike or something like that, that's from natural rubber. So long and short of it is natural rubber is one of the coolest raw materials out there, but it's not great for using in floor covering. So what we use, we'll use a small amount of natural rubber, which will add some slip resistance characteristics, things of that nature. But the bulk of rubber
00:17:03
Speaker
is a byproduct of the petroleum industry. Basically, it's a waste that's generated, which we can thankfully use to generate this resin that has these great properties. The nice thing about rubber is that it's easily recyclable into a variety of different things after its use. It does not have bad chemical properties, anything of that nature.
00:17:32
Speaker
You mentioned what happens after a product's use. I think we're seeing more and more attention paid to this concept of circularity. When you put something in, first of all, where does it come from, but then also where does it go after you finished using it? Where does your flooring go in 10 years time or however long a life cycle of your flooring might be?
00:17:56
Speaker
is it safely recycled after that? So encouraging a different way of thinking about a purchase, which isn't just one sense, well, how long will it last? Like on a sort of a linear approach. Well, how many years can I have used? Can I get out of this and therefore how much value? But also what impact is this product having before and after its life, right? So you kind of almost then try and pick things up again with the client at the end of that. Is it 10, 15 years for a fit out?
00:18:25
Speaker
Well, I think so with lifecycle, there's two things that I always look at, which is number one, how long is the product going to last? Uh, number one and number two, how much energy has to be put into that product while it is in service? Meaning what does your maintenance regime going to be? Do you have to be constantly applying a finish to it to keep it looking good, to keep it from, uh, to keep it clean. And you know, we talk about the recycled rubber flooring. Uh, and that's one of those things, maybe the lifecycle lifetime of the floor is similar.
00:18:55
Speaker
But the amount of energy that has to be put in to maintain that with all the finishes which have to be manufactured, which have off gassing as they're applied, your labor cost there is far more than the material ever will be.
Balancing Aesthetics and Sustainability
00:19:10
Speaker
So that's a hugely important part with the life cycle cost, obviously, is that maintenance requirement. And that's where with rubber flooring, it's such a phenomenal product because there's so little that's necessary.
00:19:25
Speaker
And as we continue to develop our products and in general with solid vulcanized rubber flooring, it's a fairly low maintenance product. And it's great for that, not having to use finishes, not having to use waxes, things of that nature. But getting back to the actual life span of the product, it will last for
00:19:49
Speaker
decades. You know, if you want your rubber floor to last for 30 years, as long as you maintain it properly, it's going to last that long. Now the colors probably will probably fall out of fashion in that period of time. So what can you do with it? Well, you can do a couple things. Number one, you can install floor on top of it. And the nice thing about rubber is in particularly our cork rubber is it has phenomenal acoustical properties. So if you install something on top of it,
00:20:17
Speaker
you're going to get the benefit of the existing floor covering for the acoustical reasons or it can be removed and it can be recycled and the recycling process for that is basically grinding it back up into chips and we use chips of rubber in our product to make different patterns and designs, things of that nature. In fact, all of our factory waste
00:20:42
Speaker
We use that same process. We grind up the waste and then we use that as color chips in our top layer or the backing.
00:20:50
Speaker
That was going to be one of my questions then around the aesthetics or the design part of it. And you mentioned how there's obviously to a degree certain colors or looks that might be popular for a number of years. Are there any, given the central role that this sort of sustainable approach to sustainability has within your business, are there any constraints that you come across in terms of balancing the aesthetics or the actual products that you're putting out there
00:21:20
Speaker
that are held back in any way by your value system or do the two really go hand in hand and you're free to do pretty much anything you like aesthetically or have you got certain limits to what you can achieve? Well, so by nature, I guess I would say I'm more of the designer slash innovator of products and I really enjoy the challenges of coming up with different things, with new things.
00:21:49
Speaker
90% of which never get out of my lab. But that's kind of the fun of it. And with cork, there are huge challenges. There are challenges in how the raw material reacts once installed. If people have used solid cork flooring in the past, for instance, a lot of people have had issues with it for dimensional stability reasons, things of that nature, which we've overcome through a variety of different innovations.
00:22:15
Speaker
but also with colors, you know, people want colors and with pork, you've got brown, brown and brown. Those are your, those are your colors. So how do you take those and, and, and, and make changes? And, uh, you know, through the baking process, we get different tones of brown from basically a light tan to a black, um, and then go back and, and, and start to mix those things, use traditional woodworking techniques to, to,
00:22:39
Speaker
laminate things together, do cross cuts, re-laminate them, and really come up with some pretty neat patterns. A lot of my development and innovation comes from looking at what was done in the past and going through archives of factories and looking at the materials they made back in the early 1900s and finding some really cool things and kind of bringing things back out.
00:23:03
Speaker
And that's what we did with work flooring was literally going through the basements of a factory that we worked with and finding some things that they did in the past and bringing those patterns back out with the modern twist. It's funny, isn't it? But in so many different aspects of our lives now, it can feel like, in a way, rediscovering how things were done
00:23:32
Speaker
not prior to the Industrial Revolution, but certainly say plus minus 100 years ago or more. And there was just a simplicity to how certain things were done back then. And I think there's this appreciation now for that slightly more natural touch. And I wasn't expecting it to come from you, but you're totally on it, which is just great to see. I've always felt we tend to, as a society, overcomplicate so many things when a lot of times you just stop, look back and see what was done in the past.
00:24:01
Speaker
You can put technology, apply technology to something that was done, but you can really learn some pretty cool things from past history, which has maybe been buried, but not gone forever.
Gym Flooring and Future Innovations
00:24:14
Speaker
especially when it comes to, I think, natural materials, natural, yeah, working with nature, essentially. Okay, so let's look at gyms because it's my favorite subject. You've got three ranges, sustain, sport, flex sport, and practice cork. How are each of those beyond the aesthetics?
00:24:34
Speaker
What are the sort of pros and cons or how would someone go about deciding which might be more applicable? Do you tend to suggest breaking it down according to what type of activity is happening in the gym? If it's a sort of a big, I don't know, bodybuilding gym, you might suggest one material versus if it's more, I don't know, sort of group class fitness studio, you might suggest the different material. How do you how do you work with those three? So they definitely have there's two
00:25:03
Speaker
very distinct groups of products I would say. One would be the Praxis solid cork and then the other would be the sustained cork rubber or the flex solid rubber. The solid cork product is a great material for light fitness areas where you're doing a lot of floor exercises, yoga studios, things of that nature that that product has been
00:25:31
Speaker
very well received. Anytime you're on the floor doing those exercises, having a product like Quirk, which is a very good insulator, it's going to feel warm to the touch versus if you have a vinyl type of a product, something like that, there's no insulation. So you're going to get the cool temperature of typically the concrete slab that's underneath of that. So Quirk is really nice for that, obviously has great resilience to it, great acoustical properties.
00:26:01
Speaker
Cork is not something that you're gonna want to put in a place where you're using heavy free weights It it is not gonna resist that type of abuse So it certainly has its place and as I said, I would say light fitness Things places where people are not going to be dropping heavy loads on them You get into the rubber products the sustain is kind of my go-to product for fitness
00:26:28
Speaker
because it has 65% cork in it, it has tremendous acoustical properties, it has tremendous sustainability properties, great slip resistance, foreign excess typically of most safety flooring products. It has phenomenal durability, the list goes on and on as far as the suitability for that and what's
00:26:56
Speaker
exciting about these the sustain and also the flex product is we now have All of our products in those two lines all colors are available in two different thicknesses For the sports range being six millimeter or nine millimeter thickness And what we do is we actually laminate the top layer to a recycled rubber backing and
00:27:23
Speaker
which now we're bringing in more recycled content. The nice thing about the recycled rubber backing is it's on the backside so we don't have to worry about the content of that recycled rubber, which is a concern once on the top side. And it produces a, once again, a great acoustical and a product that's, you know, it's going to protect your subfloor when you're dropping weights, things of that nature.
00:27:51
Speaker
Now, if you're getting into heavy, heavy free weights, you can actually install underlayment underneath of our product. So you can build it up to 12 millimeters thick, even thicker than that 15 millimeters people have done. But it's also a good idea if you're going to be dropping heavy things to put a good drop off mat on because ultimately,
00:28:16
Speaker
The biggest concern with heavy weights is damage to the subfloor, not necessarily to the flooring material. So that's something you have to pay attention to. Yeah, I often, certainly in sort of my plans where I'm laying out a gym floor.
00:28:30
Speaker
For example, go with the cork underneath, or the cork rubber underneath, and then in the strength area, especially now with the trend for crossfit type stuff, where they tend to pick up a barbell and not necessarily put it down too delicately, having a nice big thick extra layer, if you like, just sitting on top of the base layer around that strength.
00:28:51
Speaker
that strength zone within the gym seems to take care of it. What's coming up? What's in the pipeline? It sounds like you're moving at 100 miles an hour and you've got your full of ideas. I'm guessing you've got more innovations coming. What's in the future if you can give us a sense of that?
Closing and Contact Information
00:29:08
Speaker
Well, we've got a product that I'm really excited about coming out at some point in time this year. COVID has not helped us or anyone else as far as advancing
00:29:21
Speaker
Innovation particularly, but it's a it's a it's a product made out of solid rubber It's a roll product which will be it'll be available in tiles and rolls Has more of a terrazzo type of a look to it much more subtle color tone on tone type of a situation with the design of it and a bunch of new colors It's a lot more exciting things about it as well which will
00:29:50
Speaker
be coming out with at some point in time.
00:29:53
Speaker
Very cool. Well, listen, I'm a huge fan. It's been great to get some of, yeah, pick up on some of your energy and ideas today, so I appreciate that. Zandoor.com, we'll link in the show notes. In terms of someone contacting you, is it better to go via the headquarters in the US? I know you then have sort of local distributors or representatives in each country. Yeah, if you look at our website, you can email us directly through that and someone will get back to you with our local salesperson, or we also list our different international
00:30:24
Speaker
salespeople as well. We've got it. All right. Well, listen, thanks so much again. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.