What You Need to Know About LEED-Qualified Flooring

Using the right materials to make your commercial floors beautiful doesn't have to just be about aesthetic value. It can also create health benefits, improve indoor air quality, and make your office a more environmentally-friendly space. There are measurable ways to create all these advantages and materials that help. There's also a type of certification that publicly recognizes these efforts with a highly-respected certification program.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and it's a green program run by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). LEED certification can be applied to buildings or how materials used for their construction improve environmental and energy utility. LEED certification does not apply to specific products and particular manufacturer brands. So, what does all this mean for your floor installation?

Quite simply, while you can't install a specific material in your building that's LEED certified, you can indeed invest in types of materials and construction methods that earn you LEED points. Accumulating enough of these will eventually earn you LEED certification. This applies to flooring too.

What is LEED-Qualified Flooring?

LEED-Qualified flooring is a type of floor material or construction method that earns your building LEED points. Earning enough of these points for different elements of your office or building construction will in turn bring you closer to LEED certification or improve your LEED certification level. Levels include LEED Certified, LEED Silver, LEED Gold, and LEED Platinum.

So, when it comes to flooring, how it’s built and how it integrates with the rest of your building's installation will cause you to gain LEED points. But for flooring, not all materials are created equal to achieve LEED points.

For example, if you use wood floors throughout your office or other building space, they will only earn you points if the wood was first certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as sustainably harvested. You can earn further points if instead of natural wood, you use materials such as wood composite, which are usually made from recycled lumber. Or you can simply use an entirely different material that is more environmentally friendly to earn even more LEED points.

To offer another example, the USGBC awards LEED points for floor installations that "reduce the quantity of indoor air contaminants that are odorous, irritating and/or harmful to the comfort and well-being of installers and occupants."

Some of the most trusted flooring materials for complying with the above and other USGBC requirements are finished flooring products such as tile, masonry, cut stone, and terrazzo. These are in fact so well regarded that they don't even require IAQ (Indoor Air Quality) testing to qualify for LEED credits.

To quote the USGBC itself: "Mineral-based finish flooring products such as tile, masonry, terrazzo, and cut stone without integral organic-based coatings and sealants and unfinished/untreated solid wood flooring qualify for credit without any IAQ testing."

How Terrazzio Can Help

When it comes to earning LEED points that help you with certification, Terrazzio is an ideal choice that also offers many aesthetic and practical benefits. 

What's more, the small-to-large format tiles offered in different shapes, colors, and filling materials by Terrazzio give you the option of selecting the colors and patterns you prefer. You can even choose your own custom designs.

Another huge benefit of terrazzo tiles from Terrazzio is that they last an extremely long time even after heavy-duty use. Moreover, their color patterns and designs fully saturate each tile, meaning they will never wear out or fade. Terrazzio tiles are also easy to clean, easy to maintain, and extremely durable. All these factors make them exceptionally useful for high-traffic flooring while helping you earn LEED points with a minimum of testing or other requirements.

Contact Terrazzio at any time for further details about the many tile shapes, styles, and color options available.