Porcelain tile is inherently green. As one of the most sustainable building materials in the world, it contributes to greener design and long-term resource conservation. But it’s not without its challenges when it comes to environmental impact. Crossville is focused on leading in sustainable initiatives for making porcelain tile as green as possible by ensuring material health and following high standards for responsible resourcing and conservation, as well as using recycled content in production.
In this podcast produced by MarketScale, host Daniel Litwin speaks with William Paddock, co-founder & managing director of WAP Sustainability Consulting, about how sustainability continues to drive the future of AEC, and specifically, how the tile industry is shifting its approach to sustainability and who in the industry is leading the way.
Listen to the podcast here or read the transcript below.
MarketScale Podcast Transcript
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Daniel: Hello everyone. Welcome to the AEC podcast brought to you by Market Scale. I’m your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. From mining at the quarry to milling on the factory floor, to extruding, shaping pattern printing, a tile goes through many heavy duty processes and with each of these comes a layer of waste and impact on the environment, albeit in varying degrees. As other markets and AEC adjust and embrace sustainable measures to cut back on their ecological footprint. How is the tile industry responding and who is leading the way?
Daniel: I’d like to welcome William Paddock, Co-founder and managing director of WAP Sustainability Consulting to give his insights on this topic of tile sustainability.
Daniel: William, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
William: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.
Daniel: Absolutely, absolutely. I’m looking forward to chatting with you. I did a little background research on you and found that you were an avid sportsman. You hunt deer, turkey, waterfowl, you chase fish in the Gulf of Mexico. So you live a very exploratory life, which is great. But you know, I think that kind of background probably gives you an even deeper appreciation for why it’s important for industries, manufacturers and just business as a whole to be sustainable.
William: Yeah, absolutely. I find myself connected to nature in a variety of ways and I enjoy the way that I do that so much so that it makes me care significantly for the way we treat our planet and the way we treat our natural resources.
Daniel: Absolutely. So since WAP acts as basically the equivalent of an outsource sustainability department for companies, you and the company as a whole has felt sustainability affect various industries and affect them differently. So to focus in the conversation, what would you say is unique about sustainability approaches and architecture, engineering and manufacturing specifically?
William: Sure. Primarily sustainability is focused on a lot of good data. And so if you distill down just about any manufacturer’s sustainability strategy, you tend to find yourself in two buckets. The first is a conversation around carbon, so looking at the carbon footprint of products, the carbon footprint of operations, which would include energy, waste, water, natural gas, natural energy resources and things of that nature. The carbon intensity of a product would be like the embodied carbon footprint on the product or how many carbons did it take to make the product.
William: And then probably the other side of it is a human health element as companies are trying to be good corporate social citizens. They want to be socially responsible, but they also want to make products in a way that doesn’t do negative damage to the environment or our human health.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s definitely multilayered in manufacturing, not only for … Especially when we talk about human health, not only for the end users but also for the professionals that are on site, either on the factory floor or at the job site and are dealing with some of the firsthand effects of the work they do.
William: For sure. Across the whole value chain, suppliers have suppliers who have workers who are exposed to different elements who live in communities where products are made and pollution is incurred. You have users of the product, specifically in the AEC environment. One of the challenges is as we’ve made buildings more energy efficient and we’ve tightened the building envelope, the chemicals of concern that we put inside buildings all of a sudden start to mean a little bit more because they’re not cycling out. They’re not leaking out. It’s not grandma’s leaky house. It’s a very tight building envelope. So those chemicals of concerns have more impact to the users and occupants of a building.
William: Then downstream what happens to products and materials after a product’s useful life has been reached? Are there impacts of those products as they degrade or deteriorate or get recycled or end up in a landfill? What happens to those people and those communities where those products go?
Daniel: Right. So I think the social push for sustainability is very noted and something we’ve talked on already. But the regulatory pushes aren’t always as talked about, especially when they’re focused in on just specific markets and industries. So is there anything new in the AEC world of law or standard wise that is further encouraging sustainable practices today? Something that stands out to you?
William: Yeah, legally speaking, there’s not as much we’re seeing on the AEC side. It’s really being market driven by some of the large architect and design firms who are really putting a focus on buying products from companies who understand and can communicate transparently what’s in their product. This sort of ties to a movement around consumers right to know, the consumers right to have information to make informed decisions.
William: We’re seeing that in a regulatory standpoint in other industries. For instance, the state of California, with their proposition five, a complicated piece of legislation that requires labeling of chemicals of concern on the packaging and the product. But we’re seeing that sort of mentality move into cleaning products as an example. So the state of New York and the state of California have passed transparency bills that basically require cleaning products companies to disclose what’s in their products to consumers on package and on website within five clicks.
William: We’re seeing some of the same stuff happen from a regulation standpoint on cosmetics. We haven’t seen that move as much on the AEC side because we’ve really seen that demand for transparent material and ingredient information come from the customer. So the architect designers, the technology companies building large facilities and buildings and are concerned about the human health impacts of the chemicals they’re putting in their buildings for their workers. It’s really a form of market based regulation that’s happening in the AEC world.
Daniel: So really some of the fresh standards or regulatory practices are coming less from the top and more from the bottom up?
William: Absolutely. You’re seeing a world in which the customer is asking questions, hard questions to manufacturers and saying, “Hey, I want to know what’s in your product down to 99.99% ,” and that’s hard for a manufacturer because of today’s modern day supply chains. People buy from other people and those suppliers buy from other suppliers, and so very quickly on a product that people would consider very simple, you’re six tiers deep into a supply chain to chase that hundred part per million level disclosure.
William: It’s a lot of work. It’s a different way of purchasing commodities and chemicals and materials. It’s different questions that have to find their way into the procurement process. Otherwise we’re not getting to a point of more informed knowledge and the consumer is not getting that information they need under their quote unquote “right to know”.
Daniel: Right. Let’s turn and focus our conversation on specifics now and really look at the main topic of the podcast, which is tile manufacturing. So it’s just one piece of the market, but I think it’s important to look at little pieces of the market like that because they can often be microcosms for how sustainability is affecting AEC as a whole.
Daniel: So let’s get some background information here on what manufacturing tile typically takes and how that’s affecting the environment. So what are the processes that are most closely associated with manufacturing tile that you’d say most negatively impact the environment?
William: Tile is a unique product in that it’s been around really since almost the beginning of time in a lot of ways.
Daniel: Right, since we crawled out of the cave.
William: Yeah. It’s a proven and long standing product. You can find tile hundreds of years old. From an environmental standpoint, tile has a couple of challenges. One is you’re extracting minerals and materials from the earth, so there’s a very visible scraping and mining of the earth. Then there’s a conversion of that in which you’re taking basically powders or minerals and you’re making a slurry and then you’re using an insane force to press out water and create dry product and then you’re baking it.
William: There’s a biodiversity concern and there’s an energy concern. But the unique part about it is that the product does perform and it holds up for a long period of time. So over the course of the lifetime of tile, certainly there’s a significant environmental impact to produce tile, but the longer that tile stays in play, the less that environmental burden comes on a year to year basis. Tile really can outperform a lot of other flooring materials as long as it stays on the ground for a long period of time.
William: That’s the most challenging element of tile’s environmental story is that it works best if it stays around for a long time. It can certainly outlast other types of flooring. So yeah, I think that’s its most challenging opportunity.
William: I think tile manufacturers have done an amazing job at finding ways to make modern tile with less energy resources than ever before. The kiln, the drying processes, the processing through the facilities has become insanely more efficient than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago and certainly before that.
Daniel: Walk me through what that manufacturing process did look like 20 or 30 years ago and what it looks like today. How has tile manufacturing sort of improved on those big issues?
William: Yeah. I think mainly working backwards, the kiln and drying processes, the ability to add heat to a product and dry tile faster with less natural gas or whatever fuel source is being used is definitely the easy win. There’s been significant technological improvements in that area. The manufacturer can spend less money on energy resources in order to make a set of tile. That then corresponds to lower carbon footprints and less natural gas energy and that sort of stuff that goes into the process.
Daniel: Compared to other big hitters in manufacturing, so maybe we’re talking about quartz, maybe we’re talking about granite, maybe we’re talking about steel, whatever it might be, how does tile match up on the sustainability front? Does it typically produce more waste, less waste? Is it one that was in dire need of better sustainable practices because it used to produce so much waste or negative impact on the environment?
William: Yeah. So on tile, the rework is something that can be done over and over again. The amount of manufacturing waste from a tile facility is pretty low because tile companies have figured out ways to just continually and infinitely recycle the materials that you know are coming off of their post-industrial process.
Daniel: Right.
William: So that results in pretty low manufacturing waste when you compare that to other industries who have more mixed materials. That’s a huge win. The same win exists in harvesting water from the production process and actually separate separating out that water and solids and then reusing that water. That’s a progressive solution that the tile industry has come up with.
William: End of life recycling programs, bringing a tile product back from jobs recycling that, grinding that up back into a powder or find form to reintroduce in a post-consumer content back into tile products. That’s an amazing solution as well that tile has done. All of this overall is just helping reduce the carbon footprint of tile and that’s a win in a lot of ways.
William: Compared to some of the other industries that you referenced, each one of those have some of their own positive stories that they have in their own production processes, which are rather, in a lot of cases, different. So it’s to make a true comparison there.
William: Another example of, I think, a successful environmental solutions we’re seeing out of the tile industry is take an example of Crossville tile for example, who’s created a partnership with TOTO, the porcelain toilet manufacturer, to take a lot of their post industrial toilets, these are white porcelain defective or broken chipped pieces of porcelain tile which Crossville has taken from their facilities. They grind it up and reintroduce that into their product. Tile is so useful that even, in some cases, manufacturers are taking postindustrial waste off of other manufacturer’s hands in order to introduce that into their products.
Daniel: I’m glad you brought up Crossville. I think they’re a great example of taking forward thinking sustainable practices and applying them to the tile industry and seeing great success from doing so. I know Crossville also recently achieved some certifications that are a first in the tile industry that I think are really important to unpack.
Daniel: The first was that they’re the first third party verified red list free declare label for the tile industry. They’re also the first tile product to achieve the living product challenge petal certification. So let’s break both of those down. Why are these two significant to the tile manufacturing industry and to just manufacturing as a whole?
William: Sure. So the first third party verified red list declare label is a big deal. I think there’s around, I want to say 80 third party verified red list free products out of 2000 plus in the declared database. So it puts Crossville at the front of the class.
William: What the red list free designation is saying and what the declare label does is it’s basically transparently communicating what’s in the tile product down to a hundred parts per million. That’s the requirement to make a red list free statement. Then that declared label, which is transparently communicating the material ingredients, has been third party verified, meaning a verifier has come in and looked at that information all the way back to where did the information come from the supplier? It’s a trusted form of chemical disclosure from Crossville to signal that they’re serious and trying to be transparent with what they’re sharing about what’s in their product.
William: The living product challenge is the next level, the next generation of that. Both of these programs are managed by the International Living Future Institute who also owns the Living Building Challenge. The Living Product Challenge is a multi-attribute product certification. It is in probably its fourth or fifth year. There’s 20 different imperatives that a manufacturer must go through to achieve this that Crossville obtained, I believe, petal certification and became the first tile company to achieve that.
William: They’re stating their red list free, they’re stating the certification signifies there’s no carcinogens are immune to genetics or reproductive toxins in the product, which is a huge benefit or a huge point of interest to those who are curious about healthy materials and healthy buildings. It highlights the amount of carbon and energy and waste and water that were part of the products. It’s a true, very difficult to achieve multi-attribute certification that Crossville should be really proud of.
Daniel: Do you think that this is the beginning of a trend for other tile companies to try to achieve the same goal?
William: I think a lot of tile companies could probably achieve the Living Product Challenge themselves because the nice part about tile is, that while we have a lot of variations, there is a lot of similarities between tile products, the way tile is made. A lot of the production practices in the US in particular follow along the same line in that they’re very savvy with their ways, very savvy with their water, savvy with their energy resources. So yeah, I think tile is well suited to … The tile industry is well suited to take advantage of a certification like the Living Product Challenge because they naturally fit.
Daniel: And how important are these certifications to the industry? Do clients and other competitors or colleagues in the industry value this to a high degree and does it often influence buying decisions and whether or not someone’s going to partner with your company?
William: So I think that varies on a customer by customer basis. The International Living Future Institute, which I mentioned has their Living Building Challenge certification. I guess it was last month they came out with version 4.0 of that, which then put in a requirement that living … That you have to have so many living products per so many square feet as part of the new certification. So as companies build more living buildings, which they announced some projects by Salesforce and Kingspan and others, I think manufacturers are going to see more specifications for living buildings that ask if they have products that are living product challenge certified.
Daniel: What do you think Crossville had to do to get this right, since they’re the first tile company to achieve this living product challenge certification? What did they do that began to just set them apart from their competitors? And how should other tile manufacturers looked to Crossville in kind of I can learn something View?
William: Yeah. The one thing I think Crossville had a little bit of foresight in was that they, and this really applies to any manufacturer, is understanding fully what’s in your materials or what’s in your products down to this real finite 100 part per million, 99.99% level. It is a hard thing to do.
William: We work with a lot of different manufacturers who feel like someone in their company should know what’s in the product or they can test it or they have this or that. But actually working through that process and getting down to that finite level, we find a lot of manufacturers really struggle to know that information. Even sometimes when they think they do, they turn out that they don’t.
William: But since this knowledge about what’s in your product is such a core component of certifications, like the Living Building Challenge, it’s one of the fastest growing areas in the AEC sustainability space, which is material ingredient disclosure, so things like the health product declaration and declare label are regularly asked for from materials specialists and A&D firms and there’s even consultancies that all they do is go around and ask for this type of information.
William: So to tie that back to Crossville, Crossville I think was just an early adopter of figuring out that they should probably know what’s in the product they’re selling. Since they got a jumpstart on that when there were opportunities to capitalize on that and leverage that knowledge through a certification as a way to bolster their sustainability perspective and reputation, they took advantage of that. I think that’s a great thing that they were able to do. There’s certainly stories I’ve heard where were chemicals of concern or other products that they could purchase, they moved away from. That’s sort of in line with the whole spirit of this idea.
William: If you know things are in your product or if you know things are in your supply chain that you don’t love or that other customers may not want in the product you’re selling them, not having that knowledge in the forefront is priceless.
Daniel: All Right, William, we’re going to go ahead and start to wrap things up. I want to take what we learned here about manufacturing for the tile industry and pull out a little bit and look at what is there still left to do. So I want to ask, how do you see tile manufacturing continuing to improve? Now that we have companies like Crossville that are setting the bar, we’re starting to see certifications come through either specifically for the tile industry or tile companies being firsts to have these certifications in their market. How do you see tile manufacturing continuing to make room for more sustainable practices? What do you see around the corner?
William: I think probably the biggest thing I see is that tile is going to continue to … Tile manufacturers are going to continue to find ways to save money and have lower operational carbon footprints as technology improves. I see a continually decline of the carbon impact of a piece of tile. I think that we’re going to continue to see that.
William: I think a big opportunity for the tile industry is really around the material health side. For years, a strategy on the carbon side was to dematerialize a product. If you just make it lighter, if you have it made with fewer ingredients, you can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the product. Tile compared to a lot of other products, just uses fewer ingredients, and from a material health side, I think that story ties in as well too, is that there’s just fewer ingredients that a tile manufacturer, and really the tile industry as a whole, needs to understand. I think the whole tile industry could do a better job of telling their material health story. I think they could do a better job of telling the positive human health story of their products.
Daniel: Yeah. That’s important because that stuff really does resonate with clients as well. It’s way easier to draw personal connections and feel like, wow, this company cares about people when the people that are being affected are people, right? It’s not just, yeah, we are kind of vaguely changing processes that are going to impact our waste, or are going to positively impact the environment in a way that people can’t feel. But when you focus on the human health elements, that’s something that people can relate to I think much more tangibly.
Daniel: I think that’s something that companies in AEC, if they’re looking to make sustainable choices, that should be a first because not only are you going to be appealing to your clients a little better, but you’re also making changes that are positively affecting your end users and the professionals that work in your industry.
William: There’s an old adage about reading the side of a food label and the idea that if you can’t pronounce it, it’s probably not good.
Daniel: Right.
William: I think that same logic applies to … It definitely applies to flooring. I think it’s a positive for tile when you compare to … We’ve got a lot of different new types of flooring that have come out. Some have positive environmental and human health stories, but, but some of them, I think manufacturers and purchasers in particular, are still trying to figure out. Hearing that equation, you have something that you know, ingredients you can pronounce from probably manufacturers that you know.
Daniel: Well, William, thank you for joining us on this episode of the podcast and giving us your perspective on the future of sustainable practices in the tile industry and really why it’s so important to be putting emphasis on sustainable practices if you’re manufacturing tile.
Daniel: Again, I think Crossville is a great company to look at as an example of what to do right. I think other tile manufacturers should look to the certifications they got as kind of a benchmark for where they should seek to begin to raise their manufacturing to the next level.
Daniel: So again, William, thank you for joining us on the podcast. It was a pleasure and I’m looking forward to speaking again in the future.
William: I appreciate you having me.
Daniel: Thank you everyone for listening to today’s podcast. If you like what you heard and want to listen to episodes you can head to market scale.com/industries and subscribe to previous podcasts, articles and video content from your favorite industries. Make sure you leave a rating and a comment wherever you listen to your podcast content.
Daniel: I’m your host Daniel Litwin, the voice of B2B. Til next time.
