Chicago—For 145 years Armstrong World Industries has had a record of environmental practices—from its early days as a cork manufacturer when the company found new uses for the product to becoming the leader in linoleum and, more recently, having its corporate offices in Lancaster, Pa., become the sixth building in the country to attain the highest level of environmental certification.

At Greebuild ’07 the company unveiled Migrations Bio-Based Tile (BBT) with BioStride polymer, its “latest demonstration of the company’s commitment to progressively raising the standards for the industry and creating better products and tools that make it easy for its customers to go greener,” said Frank Ready, president and CEO of Armstrong Floor Products.

The fruition of a multi-year, multi-million dollar research and design project, BioStride provides the same or better performance attributes as vinyl polymers, he said, yet has 13% bio-based content by weight. “With BioStride, Armstrong has made a giant leap forward with the integration of rapidly renewable ingredients [such as corn], which reduces reliance on limited resources such as petroleum and fossil fuels.”

Jeffrey Ross, Ph.D., innovation manager and director of quality for Armstrong Floor Products, noted, “Linoleum gave Armstrong the experience of making flooring using only natural materials. As we looked at alternatives to linoleum, we found many global raw material resources we could apply to our portfolio of products.”

Among the materials looked at were corn, soybeans and castor oil, he noted. “[We] looked at all kinds of ideas, including specially designed bacteria and the corn polymers used to make bio-degradable environmental packaging.”

In the end, the patent-pending technology for BioStride is composed of 13% bio-based material that today is made from corn. The remaining portion is made from fossil fuel-based polymers—some of which are biodegradable.

“As this field and our expertise develops,” Ready explained, “we will be exploring how we increase this percentage. Our goal with BioStride was to move to a more sustainable polymer, which the integration of rapidly renewable ingredients achieves. As we moved through our development process, we found that PVC, plasticizers, stablizers and processing aids were not required. In fact, BioStride provides the same or better performance attributes as vinyl polymers.”

BioStride’s first use

The first application of Bio-Stride is in Migrations BBT, a commercial tile “that provides enhanced environmental attributes and combines them with enhanced performance, classic looks and affordability,” noted Dominic Rice, Armstrong’s vice president of commercial resilient. Available in the first quarter of 2008 in 28 colors that coordinate with Armstrong’s complete portfolio of products, Migrations also contains 10% pre-consumer recycled content “to further reduce virgin material usage,” 75% limestone, 14% BioStride and 1% pigments.

Ross said the 10% pre-consumer recycled content is a by-product of the limestone mining process that was previously disposed of back into the ground or into a landfill. “We worked with our suppliers to develop a secondary process by which this material could be used and diverted from disposal.”

Migrations BBT also meets low VOC emissions in compliance with California 01350 and contributes or complies with a number of LEED credits.

Armstrong estimates that a 20,000-square-foot installation of BBT—a typical truckload of product—saves energy and natural resources equivalent to 72 gallons of petroleum.

In developing the product, Ross said, “We wanted to appeal to a large, rather than a small niche of buyers to make a true sustainable option available to virtually everyone.”

That is why Armstrong chose the resilient tile route, Rice explained. “Composition tile is the most used category of commercial flooring—over one billion square feet is used in the marketplace today. We believe Migrations BBT can exert maximum pro-environmental impact on the market because it provides a greener product option at an affordable price.”

Performance driven

While Armstrong put a great deal of effort into making both BioStride and Migrations BBT as “green” as current technology allows, Rice said the company made sure it did not sacrifice performance and style. And it did so without added expenses to the end user. “We wanted to extend the choice of a greener hard surface flooring solution to every customer.”

He pointed out that the company not only met its goals but actually exceeded them because the product is not only an affordable, eco-friendly alternative to traditional vinyl composition tile (VCT), but it features twice the indent resistance, has more than five times greater resistance to impact and is more than 2.5 times more resistant to cracking from uneven subfloors.

“And the best part,” Rice added, “is there are no learning curves. There are no special maintenance or installation requirements. It has the identical gauge of composition tile and is designed to be maintained using traditional resilient flooring maintenance methods.”

Migrations will be marketed to the A&D community, facility owners and operators, specifiers, flooring contractors and others in the commercial marketplace, including education, healthcare, retail, hospitality, etc., through a comprehensive sales and marketing approach, he said.

Paul Sharihari, principal and founder of GreenMind, a consulting and technology development firm, said with Migrations BBT “Armstrong makes it easy to go green. A specifier no longer has to choose between a greener product and the project’s budget, which opens up enormous opportunities in virtually every market, including education, healthcare, retail, etc. Even with a tight budget, now a basic green building component can be incorporated with minimal increased up-front costs.”

On the Greenbuild show floor, Kent Clauson, marketing manager for Armstrong Commercial Flooring, said even though the product will not be available for a few more months, the response has been overwhelming. “We already have heard about people wanting to switch out specs to accommodate this product.”

In the end, concluded Ready, that is what it is all about: “To provide products and services to our customers that enable them to reduce the environmental impact of the buildings they create. Building together and making the best use of our many inspiring choices, we and our customers can uphold an important heritage of sustainability and help preserve for coming generations the natural world we’ve inherited.”