-By AnnMarie Marano

It's a long way from limited to renewable, but after two years Armstrong™ Commercial Flooring has finally completed the journey. The flooring giant's FloorScore™ certified BioBased Tile™ is being labeled as a revolutionary new category that uses rapidly renewable resources (such as corn) and a new polymer called BioStride™ that has replaced PVC and allows for twice the impact and two and a half times greater deflection. This first BioBased Tile collection is called Migrations™.

Want even more good news? The product has no new installation requirements and is actually cheaper to install than traditional linoleum ($4.25-$4.75 per sq. ft. to install for linoleum and $2.50-$3.00 per sq. ft. for BioBased). It seems that specifiers no longer have to compromise sustainability for price points.

"We looked at many different sources," says Kent Clauson, Armstrong marketing manager for commercial flooring. "We looked at industry publications, listened to customers, and heard there was a demand for greener products, specifically in hard surface flooring at better price points." According to Armstrong, compared to conventional composition flooring, a 20,000-sq.-ft. installation of BioBased Tile saves energy and natural resources equivalent to 72 gallons of petroleum. BioStride has 13 percent biobased content by weight, and Migrations contains 10 percent preconsumer recycled content. Biobased Tile also contributes to at least four LEED® credits and qualifies for several other key industry environmental rating systems.

Development started in 2005 with research projects at two major universities. Armstrong built on that work and in 2006 performed extensive testing that resulted in the Biostride polymer. "We have five patents pending right now on that. We're excited about where it allows us to now look," says Clauson.

"When we thought of this product introduction, we broke it down into three steps: leap, transform, and migrate," explains Clauson, adding that it's easy for people to use, thanks to the same installation process and a huge color palette. "We wanted it to be logically intuitive," Armstrong principal designer, commercial flooring, Paul Pearce says of the product's color palette, which is presented in two groups (neutrals and colors). "The whole thing has an underlying skeleton, or logic. Wherever you went with it—retail, education, healthcare—you could pick a color palette based around the neutrals."

In addition, Armstrong Commercial Flooring has relaunched its Web site (www.armstrong.com/flooring), adding a link to EcoScorecard, which will be able to directly illustrate the benefits of Biobased Tile. Armstrong is one of the first manufacturers to employ the EcoScorecard tool, which presents Armstrong's entire product portfolio and allow users to quickly search, evaluate, and document each product's environmental contributions according to key industry rating systems. All the user has to do is enter the quantity of the product desired, material cost per unit, and zip code of the project. EcoScorecard then produces a results page that shows how the individual product contributes to key industry rating system criteria, such as LEED, the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS), Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC), and Labs for the 21st Century (LABS21). Circle No. 200