Jackie Dettmar, Mohawk’s vice president of design and product development, and Royce Epstein, its A&D design director. Courtesy Lynsey Weatherspoon
By Ken Shulman
Nature offers us myriad shades of green to consider, from artichoke to fern to mint. For companies that want to be sustainable, there are just as many shades of green to explore. Mohawk Group, a $9.5 billion commercial-flooring company, has tried on lots of them.
“We’ve been through many phases in sustainability,” says Jackie Dettmar, a 30-year Mohawk employee currently serving as vice president of design and product development. “Recycled content. Cradle to cradle. Reducing one’s environmental footprint,” she enumerates. “That was the bandwagon, and we jumped on. It wasn’t wrong, but our decisions were driven by external factors. After a while, we decided we wanted something more holistic, something that felt like ours.”
Mohawk’s search for an original, all-encompassing sustainability strategy led it to the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), a nonprofit organization that works to bring environmental and social justice to all parts of the world. In 2006, ILFI created the Living Building Challenge—widely considered the world’s most rigorous green-building standard. More recently, the organization launched several equally exhaustive companion projects. One of them, the Living Product Challenge, was of particular interest to Dettmar and her colleagues.
“We had already gone through an ILFI Living Building Challenge two years ago with our [Light Lab Design Center] in Dalton, Georgia,” she explains. “It just made sense for us to start applying the same criteria to the way we make our products. I’ve made a lot of carpet in my career. If we are going to keep making more, there has to be a good reason why.”
The Living Product Challenge differs from previous sustainable-product strategies in nature and scope. The seven certification criteria, or “Petals,” require companies to examine the full life span and impact of their products—from sourcing to installation to disposal. Energy and water use during manufacturing must be reduced and offset. Companies also need to provide a workspace that is safe, well lit, and free of materials that might damage their employees’ health; improve the communities surrounding their facilities; and, last but certainly not least, create products that both respect the natural world and emulate objects found in it. A product that meets at least three of the seven criteria gets a Petal certification.
“It’s not about reducing your footprint, trying to do less harm in the world,” says Dettmar. “It’s about your handprint, leaving the world in better shape than when you found it. The Living Product Challenge is the only thing I’ve seen that requires you to have a net positive effect on the world.”
Accepting the Living Product Challenge required some aggressive introspection at Mohawk. The hard look inward started at Mohawk’s factory in Glasgow, Virginia, where colleagues from the product design, human resources, manufacturing, research and development, and sustainability departments brainstormed for weeks about water use; electricity; employee access to daylight; machinery; materials; and the importance of health and wellness.