sustainable interior flooring Zandur
The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast series takes a deep-dive into the role of sustainability, wellbeing and community in real estate and hospitality.
Here we discuss sustainable interior flooring with Robert McKee of Zandur in the USA.
Sustainable interiors & healthy flooring material
Welcome to episode 15 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss sustainability and wellness in real estate and hospitality. This episode we’re with Robert McKee, the dynamic founder of Zandur sustainable flooring based in Virginia, USA that supplies hospitals, offices, gyms and residential spaces around the world.
Designing a healthy indoor environment
Flooring plays a fundamental part in creating a healthy indoor environment, particularly indoor air quality, now more than ever designers and architects need to be thinking about cleaning and hygiene, which is where Zandur comes in…
Robert talks us through the world of healthy product certifications, the many benefits of using cork as a raw material, 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 a possible 30 years, as well as Zandur’s innovative approach to design that draws inspiration from craftsmen of the early 1900’s.
If you like this type of content please consider subscribing and you can of course find Zandur USA or a local distributor at zandur.com
GUEST: ROBERT MCKEE / Founder, Zandur / www.zandur.com
HOST: MATT MORLEY / www.biofilico. com / www.biofit.io / www.bioblu.org
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A full transcription follows, courtesy of Otter.ai:
Matt Morley
Welcome to Episode 15 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we discuss sustainability and wellness in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of BioBlu sustainability, Biofilico wellness interiors and Biofit nature gyms.
This episode, we're with Robert McKee, the dynamic founder of Zandur sustainable flooring based in Virginia, USA, supplying hospitals, offices, gyms, and residential spaces around the world. 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 Sandur's ballpark.
Robert talks us through the world of healthy product certifications, the many benefits of using cork as a raw material, why you do not want natural rubber in your floor covering but rather vulcanised rubber, the lifecycle of flooring and the role of maintenance over what can be 30 years, as well as Zandur'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. And you can of course find Zandur and the local distributors listed on their website zandur.com
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Robert, thank you so much for joining us today. You founded the company back in 2004. Could you give us quick introduction to what Zandur flooring looks like today as a business, your products and, so on?
Robert McKee
Well, sure, and I appreciate it, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. A little bit about the company, we did start in 2004. The objective from the beginning has always been to focus on sustainable commercial products, the floor covering portion of construction and really with a focus of not selling something sustainable products that really perform or outperformed other products in the industry that weren't necessarily sustainable, and also meeting those same price points.
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 in fact. Sustainability was not something that people even talked about, you know, back in my grandfather's era. But it's always been something that we have had in our product line. And everything we've sold has had that sustainability story before it became popular. So it's something we just continue with.
Matt Morley
I think that really comes through in your current communications online that it is a fundamental piece of what you do rather than an afterthought that you've sort of tacked on at the end. It looks like you've built the business around that philosophy or that it's just it's just part of how you see the world, I think that there is a clear difference now in companies that really have a deep value system behind them like yours and that was very much the initial insight that led me to contacting you. 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?
Robert McKee
Correct. So basically just getting back real quick to what what you've mentioned and kind of where we come from, there's a lot of temptation always for companies to go out and sell products just to sell products, for instance, you know, we have plenty of opportunities to go and sell vinyl based products, things of that nature. And it's something from the beginning we've always made the point of focusing on sustainability. We're not going to enter into having non-sustainable products, competing with the big guys, yes they do have their sustainable lines but also their non sustainable lines. And to me it kind of defeats the whole purpose, either we're all in on sustainability or we're not.
But getting back to the products that we have. The first flagship product is something that we introduced way back when, it's a product made of cork and rubber combined. We've just recently made some significant improvements to that, it has great cleanability, which is obviously really important these days, chemical resistance, slip resistance, all those sorts of things. Then we have our solid rubber product, which is kind of the go-to heavy duty type of floor covering product for hospitals, airports, things of that nature. 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.
Matt Morley
So then, from an architect or an interior designer or design and build team perspective, how do they select one of these different materials and what that sort of pros and cons do they each have? I know you big on healthy product declaration certifications, right? The idea of a Declare label, from the the International Living future Institute and the Red List.
Robert McKee
So 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. And you can see that we participate in is these transparency programmes. The challenge is the cost for a small company, which can be a certain barrier to entry, whether intentional or not, so we try to pick and choose what's going to be most important, what's really going to tell the story about our product to the clients because ultimately, that's what we're trying to do - easily convey the sustainability story of our product in a completely honest way. That's what everyone else is looking for too. It gets pretty challenging, I think both on the supply side, and the specifications side, for people to really understand even what they're looking at. And I find that with designers or architects that have been doing this for a long time, even they get confused sometimes.
Matt Morley
Yeah, I think we end up we were looking for a quick and reliable route through in terms of digesting that information. And often Yeah, I can declare label or a cradle to cradle certificate, it's just but you know, once that's there, because of the integrity behind those systems, when a when a product comes out with that you can just rely on it. 100% I think that's they're going to be increasingly important. I think as, as the green building systems above start to require those individual product, green building products to align with their systems, because then you sort of you need everything to join up quite a bit like a Tetris puzzle. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was, and it's a big theme right now, for obvious reasons - indoor air quality.
Robert McKee
In a basic sense, floor covering can have 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 negative effect on air quality. 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 can be contained in the floor covering itself. Then as I said specifically in soft surfaces. Now if you get into products, PVC products, things of that nature, certainly off gassing is something that is is important to pay attention to. And, again, it'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. And it's always been one of those things that I've liked about pork in general, 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. On the residential side, it's something that oftentimes has been used in the past for people that have certain allergies, and then we can talk about the cleanability of a product. If you look at a solid surface of rubber flooring versus let's say, recycled rubber flooring or something like that, the cleanability level of a solid balkanized surface is extremely important to indoor air quality and just health in general - it is a very cleanable surface.
Matt Morley
That's an interesting one, because that comes up a lot with with my gym designs, where I'll often I'll see these terms banded around quite loosely like eco rubber flooring tiles, and vulcanised rubber tiles. What's the difference there? Is all rubber sustainable? Or is eco rubber more sustainable than recycled rubber? Can you help us unpick those?
Robert McKee
So yeah, this is one of the challenges that a company like ours fights against. Because there's been so much marketing that's not necessarily straightforward. All rubber is vulcanised as vulcanization is the process of curing the rubber through heat and pressure but then you have what a lot of people refer to as recycled rubber flooring, or crumb rubber flooring. And then there is vulcanised rubber flooring. The reason we call it vulcanised 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. If you look at recycled rubber flooring, the rubber chips are vulcanised. 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 glueing those chips back together. 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 top of that. You have off gassing because you have you know some of those components being the recycled rubber sometimes or not. Not great. You don't know what the contents are.
Matt Morley
Then one of your big innovations was combining rubber with cork in flooring. So how does that how does that process work? How do you blend or combine the two into one solid substance for your floors.
Robert McKee
So I can't claim to be the the ultimate inventor of that product that was actually invented way back in the early 1900s. It's a product that I discovered probably 15 or so years ago. It was not being produced. It was not being used. And I thought it was a phenomenal idea to take basically all the great properties of cork - sustainability, great acoustical properties, great comfort properties, and mix those properties with the those of rubber - phenomenal durability, a lot of options for colour too. And as a result, we've Over time develop this product, which takes the best of both worlds.
Matt Morley
When I think of cork, I guess, I think of Spain, Portugal. What about rubber? Where are you sourcing that element from?
Robert McKee
So floor covering in general, is not made from natural rubber. In fact, you really don't want natural rubber in your floorcovering for a variety of reasons. And this is one of the misconceptions that we don't go out and sell that are 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 odour from natural rubber, which most people have smelled from erasers or whatever the case may be. That odour is from a protein that is active in natural rubber, and can also cause allergies as well. Latex allergies - that's from natural rubber. So you certainly don't want that in the healthcare situation. natural rubber has very inconsistent colouring. So colour consistency is difficult, which is obviously important for design. It also has very poor ageing 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 floorcovering. 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 is a byproduct of the petroleum industry. Basically, it's a waste that's generated, which we can thankfully use to generate, you know, this resin that has these great properties. And the nice thing about rubber is that it's easily recyclable into a variety of different things after its use. And, you know, it's does not have bad chemical properties, anything of that nature.
Matt Morley
We're seeing more and more attention paid to this concept of circularity, right. So where does your flooring go in 10 years time, or however long a lifecycle of your flooring might be? And then is it safely recycled after that?
Robert McKee
So with lifecycle there's two things that I always look at which is, how long is the product going to last and how much energy has to be put into that product while it is in service meaning what is your maintenance regime going to be. If you have to be constantly painting a finish to keep it looking clean... And you know, we talked about the recycled rubber flooring and that's one of those things maybe the life cycle life time of the floor is similar but the amount of energy that has to be put into maintain that with all the finishes which have to be manufactured which have off gassing as they're applied you know your labour cost there is far more than the material ever will be. As we continue to develop our products and in general with with solid vulcanised rubber flooring, it's a fairly low maintenance product and you know it's it's, it's great for for that you know 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's it will last for decades. You know if you if you want rubber to last for 30 years, as long as you maintain it properly. It's gonna last that long now the colours 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 instal floor on top of it. And the nice thing about rubber, particularly our cork rubber is it has phenomenal acoustical properties. So if you instal something on top of it, 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 in the recycling process for that is basically grinding it back up into chips, and we use chips or rubber in our product, to make different different patterns and designs, things of that nature. In fact, all of our factory waste, we use that same process, we grind up the waste, and then we use that as colour chips in our top layer or the back end.
Matt Morley
You mentioned how there's obviously to a degree, certain colours or or looks that might be popular for a number of years, are there any constraints that you come across in terms of balancing aesthetics with your sustainable values?
Robert McKee
Well, so by 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 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 and how the raw material reacts once it's installed, if people have used style 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, but also with colours. You know, people want colours, and with cork, you've got brown, brown, and brown, those are your those are your colours. So how do you take those and make changes and you know, through the baking process, we get different tones of brown from basically a light tan to a black, and then go back and start to mix those things used to you know, traditional woodworking techniques to to laminate things together, do cross cuts, re laminate them and really come up with some pretty neat patterns. And you know, a lot of 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. And that's what we did with work flooring was was literally going through, you know, the basements of a factory that we worked with and finding some things that they did in the past and, and bringing those those patterns back out with a modern twist.
Matt Morley
It's it's, 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, not prior to the Industrial Revolution, but certainly plus or minus 100 years ago or more. There was just a simplicity to how certain things were done back then. And I think there's this appreciation now for for that slightly more natural touch, and I wasn't expecting it to come from you, but I get totally on it, which is just great to see.
Robert McKee
I've always thought 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 and you know you can put put technology apply technology to something that was done but uh you know, you can really really learn some pretty cool things from from past history, which is maybe you've been buried but not not gone forever.
Matt Morley
Okay, so let's let's look at gym design because it's one of my favourite subjects. You've got three sustainable gym flooring ranges - sustain sport, flexsport, and praxis cork, what are the sort of pros and cons or how would would someone go about deciding which might be more applicable? If it's a big bodybuilding gym, you might suggest one material versus if it's a group class Fitness Studio, you might suggest a different material?
Robert McKee
There's two very distinct groups of products, I would say. One would be the Praxis solid cork. And then the other would be the sustain 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 very well received. You know, anytime you're on the floor doing those exercises, having a product like cork, which is a very good insulator, it's going to feel warm to the touch versus if you put have a vinyl type of a product things that something like that. There's no insulation, so you're going to get the cool temperature of the typically the concrete slab that's underneath of that so cork is really nice for that obviously has great resilience to it, great acoustical properties, cork is not something that you're going to want to put in a place where you're using heavy free weights, it it is not going to resist that type of abuse. So it certainly has its place. And as I said, I would say like fitness areas where gym users are not going to be dropping heavy loads on them, that works. Then you get into the rubber products, the sustain is kind of my go to product for fitness flooring Because it has the 65% cork in it, it has tremendous acoustical properties, it has tremendous sustainability properties, great slip resistance. It has phenomenal durability, the list goes on and on, exciting about these the sustain, and also the flex product is we now have all of our products. In those two lines, all colours are available in two different thicknesses for the sports range being six millimetre or nine millimetre thickness. And what we do is we actually laminate the top layer to a recycled rubber backing, which now we're bringing in more recycled content. The nice thing about the recycled rubber backing is this on the backside so we don't have to worry about the content of that recycled rubber, which is a concern what's on the top side. And it produces a once again a great acoustical and product that's that's, you know it's going to protect yourself for when you're dropping weights, things of that nature. Navigating to heavy, heavy free weights, you can actually instal underlayment underneath of our products, so you can build up to told me 12 millimetres thick, even thicker than that 15 millimetres people have done. But it's also a good idea if you're if you're gonna be dropping heavy things to put a good drop off mat on Because ultimately, the biggest concern with heavy weights is damage to the sub floor not necessarily to the flooring material. So that's something you have to pay attention to. Yeah, I
Matt Morley
often certainly in the sort of my plans run laying out a gym floor, for example, go with the cork underneath, but then or the cork rubber underneath. And then in the strength area, especially now with sort of the trend for sort of CrossFit type stuff where Yeah, they tend to pick up a barbell and not necessarily put it down too delicately having a nice big thick, sort of extra layer, if you like to sitting on top of the of the base layer around that strength, that strength zone within the gym seems that seems to take care of it. So what have you got what's coming up? What's in the pipeline, it sounds like you're 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 what's in the future, if you can give us a sense of that? Well, we
Robert McKee
do it we've got a really 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 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 that will be available in titles and roles has more of a terrazzo type of look to it. Much more subtle colour, tone on tone type of a situation with the design of it and a bunch of new colours. A lot more exciting things about it as well, which will be coming out with some point time.
Matt Morley
Very cool. Well listen, I'm a huge fan. It's been it's been great to get some pick up on some of your energy and ideas that I saw I appreciate that zando.com will will link in the in the show notes in terms of someone contacting you, is it better to go via their headquarters in the US? I know you then have sort of local distributors or representatives in each country.
Robert McKee
Yeah, if you look at our website, you can you can email us directly through that and someone will get back to you with their local salesperson or we also list our different international sales people as well.