FloorTalk – for all the latest flooring fashions

Well first of all I would like to say thanks to Shannon Bilby for not only writing such a wonderful and informative blog, but also for letting me write a guest post about something I am passionate about, recycled rubber flooring. Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Mark Rollings and I am a co-owner of Rubber Flooring, Inc.. We specialize in marketing and selling commercial weight room flooring and home gym flooring on line. Well enough about me. Let’s talk flooring.Perhaps the latest and hottest craze in the building industry is “green building” and getting LEED points. I have even heard of a new phenomenon called “green investing” where investors are considering investing a portion of their portfolios in companies which focus on creating and marketing “green products.” Why has this become such a hot topic? I personally believe it is because the general public is slowly becoming more and more socially conscious about how our actions and practices affect the environment. Plus, we feel that if we can even do something small like buying recycled goods, we are doing our part to protect the environment for ourselves and for our kids.

This leads me to rubber flooring. There are many types of rubber flooring products on the market. Some of it is made of virgin rubber that is either harvested from rubber trees or made synthetically. Other types of rubber flooring are in fact made predominately from recycled automobile tires with an added mix of virgin rubber to add color to the product. This is the kind of rubber flooring that we sell and market at www.rubberflooringinc.com . Not only do we feel that we are doing our part environmentally, we also feel that we are creating a great product for our market and offering it at a great price compared to 100% virgin rubber flooring products.

Some examples of recycled rubber flooring can be seen below:

Just to show how our growing market is contributing to the green building craze, let me explain the history behind our market. Twenty years ago, most used tires sat in landfills like this one:Obviously this was not the best situation since tires have a degradation period estimated to be in the thousands of years and could lead to environmentally devastating landfill fires. I have heard many estimates about the amount of tires once stored in landfills but the general consensus was that there were around one billion tires in landfills at one point in time. Today there are around 250 million. That’s Progress!

Now those tires were not all used for flooring but were also used to make rubberized asphalt concrete for roads, anti slip mats for the shipping industry, synthetic turf infill, and even as a fuel derivative by pulp and paper mills. Nonetheless, recycled rubber flooring is an excellent outlet for those used tires and can help lead not only to LEED points, but also to saving the environment one tire at a time.