Brian Greenberg is the co-founder of Floorworks, a Toronto-based hardwood flooring manufacturer that selling green products and has major projects in Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Washington, New Jersey, New York, Detroit.
How did Floorworks get its start?
After 1970, we went absolutely crazy putting carpet everywhere; in fact, up until about five years ago, carpet represented approximately 70 percent of all flooring dollars spent in the U.S. Since then, the cost of energy of course has gone through the roof, and for the first time we’re looking at alternative energy. We really are talking about an alternative economic model where we put an enormous value on our resources, whereas our previous economic model put no value on our resources but put value strictly on the conversion of those sources.
There's a demand for new flooring materials. There's a need to have a single floor type that works in both living and sleeping spaces, and the product that best satisfies that is a hard surface rather than a carpet product. And the most desirable product in terms of value added is a natural wood product.
Our customer base is in Canada and we've also got a showroom in New York City. Contemporary building design tends to use a lot of glass, metal, some stone. This creates a real desire to live with flooring that is more natural. We have two types of customers: one is the first-time homeowner in Canada, who is under 35 years of age and usually single; the second type is the empty-nester. Both the baby boomer and the eco-boomer are more concerned with health and environment, and less concerned with the specific cost.
Fuse and Sumo, our flooring products, are all-timber construction, and are designed specifically to accommodate various types of construction projects, including hotels and offices. The products are developed so they can go directly on top of concrete and need no site application, and no finish. In other words, you install them and you're they’re ready to walk on. They’re all natural materials—all timber, top to bottom. They use an environmental bonding agent and an environmentally friendly oil coating.
What's most important about these constructions is that, in addition to being able to accommodate the installation directly over concrete, in terms of both stability and noise control, we're able to get very, very large boards, which is impossible when you're dealing with solid wood. Sometimes the boards that we sell are over 10 inches wide, and over seven feet long. So we would associate that type of style with a high-luxury standard.
Tell me about your latest project involving Fuse and Sumo flooring.
We’re now involved with a project that is the subject of a grant we received from the Canadian International Development Agency, which funds Canadian designers and technology people, and tries to find partners for them that would benefit from the technological exchange of information. But the nature of the project, which, I believe, is the first of its type, is a study of the relationship between use of wood flooring of this nature and its application in residential high-rise buildings. So it's a brand new world, which never existed before.
Anyway, with the ecological oil coating, it allows the product to be finished or restored without having to sand it. That becomes a big issue when you’re dealing with condominiums, in particular, because there’s a high likelihood that airborne particulates, which come from sanding, will be regulated by the condo bylaws. Right now, a lot of the wood companies in the U.S. are obligated to put a disclaimer on their wood packaging indicating that the American Cancer Society has determined that sawdust, which comes from sanding wood floors, can be a nasal carcinogen. That’s a big issue that nobody has ever really looked at that closely until now.
How important is LEED certification in your work, and where do you see LEED taking your industry?
Fuse and Sumo are LEED certified. We believe that LEED is an important part of the consciousness-raising effort about sustainability, but what we think will happen with LEED is that it will become a compliance document, which is more important to people in the insurance industry and real estate business than to the actual consumer. Mostly, LEED seems to be about operational cost savings and putting in state-of-the-art equipment. As far as HVAC is concerned, it's going to be very difficult for them to actually get down to a lot of the nitty gritty, which is important to purchasers for example is floor covering. We don’t see LEED as being a significant consumer program, but we do see it as being significant in other areas. I sat in on the first group who put together the LEED program back in '94, and at that time there was comparatively very little concern with climate change. The big issues were energy savings, because that was coming off of the OPEC crisis that had occurred a few years earlier, as well as waste management issues. So climate change is like a whole other reality that has been difficult for the industry to wrap its arms around.
How concerned are you about forest management?
The trees that are properly planted and in tropical climates do a very effective job of absorbing airborne carbon and converting it into oxygen through photosynthesis. Trees that grow in the north have a tendency of actually warming the atmosphere because the growth activity warms the soil. Whereas the tendency in the tropics with a growing tree is to cool the atmosphere, that's both in shade as well as energy generation as the plant grows. We’re very concerned about the relationship between forest management and carbon management. There’s a direct connection between the two.
Most of the timber that we use in the core of the material, which represents the tongue and groove, is either an agricultural product or a recycled product. And the face material we use is either an agricultural product or a certified wood. The bonding agent we use is likewise ecologically certified as well as the oil coating.
And then the last category relates to long-term use. Products that can be used for many many years are also being given an acknowledgement as being more suitable and get LEED accreditation points.
How does LEED accreditation work?
Well, there are two answers to that question. The maximum point total that we can get with our product is 6, but that doesn’t mean a developer is going to get six points from the wood, because there is an equation they have to use which relates to the quantity of material used in the building in conjunction with other flooring material. So for example, if 100 percent of your flooring is our product, there's a pretty good chance that you would get 100 percent of the points available. But if you used 50 percent our product and 50 percent concrete, you’d have to figure out what the offset is to come up with the point total. In addition to that, because the installation components can also contribute LEED accreditation points, in conjunction with the under? That we use you can get up to 10 points. Keep in mind that if you don't use any flooring materials, you don't get any points.
Are there economic benefits to using LEED accredited flooring?
When you’re dealing with installation directly over concrete, from the consumer point of view, you’re getting a beautiful natural flooring that traditionally you could only get by sight finishing and installation by nailing into joists. And you’re adding value to the interior environment. In 10 years, if you have our floors, you can just oil and buff. If you have polyurethane floors, you have to spend money to replace the whole thing—that’s even more expensive than replacing carpet. Our product does fall into the category of long-use, traditional-use-type wood flooring. It's the closest you can get to the appearance of traditional sight-finished wood floor.
Can you talk about how you got into selling a product that's green?
When you're involved in industrial design, you consider the technical characteristics of the market you're servicing. We need to make sure that the products we come up with satisfy a technical demand. Because the wood flooring is an important part of the marketing of the apartment of the hotel fleet, we have to ensure that it meets consumer acceptance from an aesthetic point of view. And lastly, we have to deal with the cost ownership with what we call the operational costs. In each case, it pointed us toward solutions that addressed resource availability and human health and safety issues. We tried to integrate all of those factors into the design of the product.
Maybe it's because of where we live, we live on a large lake and we have trees everywhere- we automatically think in terms of nature and conservation as being central to our value system aesthetically and otherwise. So it wasn't a political decision. Either you want to use something that’s natural and restorative or you want to use something which is a consumer throw-away item. We consider carpet to be a consumer throw-away item. We consider wood to be something which has real intrinsic value and of course importance to the natural world.
Can you talk about some of the residential projects that you’re currently working on in the United States?
It was never our intention to go into America. It really reflects the kind of globalization that’s occurring in today’s world where individuals or corporations can go into the markets that satisfy their specific needs. Toronto, where we are based, is probably the place where the condo apartment was born. We've have condos in Toronto for over 40 years. Toronto quickly became a place where a lot of people within the U.S. would come to see how condos were being marketed, and to find the consultants they would want to work with on their projects. People walk in to our showroom after having gone to some of the sales centers or presentation centers, and say, "We want your company on our projects." And then we make initial contact with them in their city. And then following that, there was a lot of business that was being developed here in Toronto by Canadian architects for projects outside Canada. As a consequence, we then got introduced to their network. So we now have major projects in Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Washington, New Jersey, New York, Detroit—both in the hospitality sector and condos. And we’re starting to see a big demand for single family homes.
What we think is influencing that, is people actually going to the condo presentation centers and picking up information about their marketing and wanting that environment in their home. And in fact, if the retirement communities are any indication- we’re going to start seeing more and more of that type of condition where you’ve got some low-rise, medium rise, single-family or town-home type units. All built using concrete construction, and all with fairly small residential floor prints.
You’re opening up a store in Manhattan in January, and you’ve had a representative there since last spring. How is your company performing?
It’s very important to have the right idea at the right time and in front of the right audience. And we seemed to fit this perfectly in New York. We’ve been very well embraced by the flooring contractors, which are always a difficulty in New York because of the labor unions. But because we don’t have a history and because our products are good products, they received us well. So the labor side of it has received us well—quite often the labor is a real barrier to progress, but not in this case at all. The builders and flooring contractors have been good. The architects and designers have sought us out, and we’ve gotten very well enmeshed into the network. And that’s all happened coincidentally with this real spiking of interest in environmental design.
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