Vinyl flooring

Circular ready flooring

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Vinyl and sustainability

Almost all of our high-quality vinyl flooring products can be recycled to close the materials loop.

Across our extensive vinyl range we offer lots of flooring that is adhesive-free, and therefore are easy to remove and circular ready. In addition, many of our vinyl flooring is made with a high percentage of recycled materials. They are produced in modern, environmentally sound European production facilities.

All our commercial vinyl is completely safe, with low carbon emissions that we declare using third party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).

Vinyl Flooring facts

10 times

Vinyl flooring is the perfect product to keep going round with for circularity. Vinyl can be recycled up to 10 times without losing any performance.
69 %

With Colorex Plus having 69% recycled content we offer the ultimate recycled product in vinyl.
100 %

Forbo’s manufacturing plants in Europe secures a high quality products which is manufactured using 100% green electricity and minimum waste streams that are all recycled back into the product.

Circular ready vinyl flooring

Our vinyl range includes circular-ready flooring that can be loose laid or installed with a pick-up glue.

Sheet
Modul'up adhesive-free sheet vinyl is a truly innovative loose lay sheet vinyl, ready for a circular future.

Adhesive free tile & plank
• Allura Click – our luxury vinyl tiles offering in realistic wood and stone designs that can be quickly and easily installed thanks to our proven and patented ‘click’ system

• Allura Puzzle - our puzzle-shaped tiles are ideal for large-scale installations, as each tile is 96 x 96cm and is simple to install by simply putting the tiles together like a puzzle

• Allura Flex and Allura Decibel - installed with a pick-up glue

• Colorex Plus - a loose-lay tile format that also comes in anti-slip and conductive version

Our vinyl flooring is safe

Designed for circularity

Our vinyl floorings are made with recycling in mind.

To make sure our flooring can be recycled at the end of their useful life, we ensure that all vinyl flooring we produce meets the strictest health requirements. For this we follow the REACH* list. That means that our vinyl is safe to use and safe to recycle. It contains no heavy metals, formaldehydes or CMR content (carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic), no solvent based inks, and no PCP.

*REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals) is a European regulator listing chemical substances with potential impact on human health.

Recycled content

Recycling is second nature for our vinyl flooring

Vinyl flooring is perfect to be reused again and again. Vinyl can be recycled up to 10 times with no loss in performance.

With Colorex Plus having 69% recycled content, we offer the ultimate recycled vinyl flooring product.

Our manufacturing plants in Europe secure high-quality products manufactured using 100% green electricity where available and with minimum waste streams. Virtually all waste produced is recycled back into our products.

With our Back to the Floor recycling program, we instigate the take-back of vinyl waste from our customers to grow recycled content even further. Our EPDs show the actual recycled content in each product. Occasionally, maximising recycled content isn’t the best way forward.

View the list of recycled content

Very low carbon footprint

With our continuous assessment and improvement we are proud to declare that Forbo Flooring vinyl products outperform the market average.

At Forbo, we offer vinyl products with a low carbon footprint. Our independent EPD’s include the latest performance for each product. The average footprint of vinyl flooring produced in Europe can be found here.

There’s nothing like vinyl

A variety of functional options in a wide range of designs developed for long lasting use

Over its whole life cycle, vinyl floor coverings perform well across a range of environmental impacts.

As a material, vinyl is ideally suited to being recycled. It is 100% recyclable and can be recycled over 10 times without losing any of its performance properties.

We do not offer a vinyl with alternative polymers, such as a Polyolefine or PUR. We also do not use bio-based plasticisers, as we think that using palm or castor oil is today by default not a better environmental solution. At Forbo Flooring Systems, the bio-based alternative to vinyl is Marmoleum while overall, vinyl offers the widest design choice and functional options.

Indoor air quality

Low product emissions

In order to secure a safe indoor air climate, all our vinyl products comply with the strictest emissions standards. Our flooring ranges are tested in accordance with key international standards.

We have approval certifications for AgBB, FloorScore® and Afsset.

That means that our vinyl flooring meets the requirements of:
• E1 Declaration conformance to EN 14041:2004
• WELL Building Standard®

And contributes to:
• BREEAM®
• LEED®
• Green Star® projects

Efficient production process

Sphera has low recycled content

In order to make sustainable vinyl flooring, at Forbo Flooring Systems we sometimes do things that defy convention.

One example is how we make our homogeneous vinyl Sphera. The traditional way to make flooring like this is to take off over 10% of the backing at the end of the line to achieve the right thickness.

Our state-of-the-art production method has been engineered for efficiency so as to only produce very minimal waste. Any waste produced is then re-used in the backing of our heterogeneous vinyl.

This is a great example of where higher amounts of recycled content is not automatically better when minimum waste and re-use are taken into account.

Our floor coverings

Meet the building requirements

All our flooring products comply with emission guidelines according to AgBB and M1 standards. We have also certified some of them according to FloorScore. When it comes to building rating systems, most products achieve A or A+ ratings in BREEAM.

In LEED, most products are directly or indirectly contributing to the following categories and credits:

Materials and resources building product disclosure and optimisation → EPD up to 2 points

Building product disclosure and optimisation → sourcing of raw materials up to 1 point

Construction and demolition waste management → up to 2 points

Indoor environmental quality → low emitting materials up to 3 points

Acoustic performance → up to 1 point