Sustainability at Pivot North

June 25th, 2024 | by: Allison Furlan and Mae Myers

At Pivot North we acknowledge the impact that

the design and construction industry sectors have on

the planet and its inhabitants.

While we are making strides to put this at the forefront of our practice, it is a work in progress. As a team, we are striving to take great care to examine the buildings we design and products we specify, to gauge how they affect our global community in areas specific to carbon offset, energy efficiency, and the well-being of the building end users including raw material sources and workforce. Stay tuned as we continue to develop our firm Climate Action Plan in the coming year. In the meantime, we would like to share with you how our Interiors team is putting their knowledge into practice in our material specifications and product library.

Our Passion for Sustainability

Hello Readers, Allison and Mae here, Pivot North’s Interior Design Studio Leads! We are both passionate about sustainability and wanted to put our passion into practice by better understanding material composition. We decided to focus on flooring since it is a large component of projects and set out to be better informed on carbon impacts, end-of-life disposal, and social justice + equity of major manufacturers. Combining our basic knowledge, we first formulated a list of questions and criteria to discuss with company sustainability specialists. Once we gathered that information, we created a spreadsheet of products per manufacturer that provides a reference guide and hierarchy of notable sustainable factors. The process helped us better understand the entire life cycle of carpet and resilient flooring products, with some clear stand-out products. Looking at each company’s sustainability goals, social justice + DEI initiatives, and take-back programs, we were able to better understand manufacturing companies in addition to the products they are producing.

Selecting Sustainable Manufacturers

Following our deep dive into product composition, we created a profile for each major manufacturer that lists products with noteworthy attributes, including Carbon Neutral or Negative products, carpet backings with high recycled content, non-PVC or bio-based resilient products, red list free products and any notable specialty products. The image below is a snapshot of the resulting document with this information which gives us a high-level overview of each manufacturer to help us make the best selections possible.

Armed with the knowledge above, we set out to dedicate a physical bookshelf in our material library to house these “star products” from manufacturers that check one or several of the boxes on our sustainability checklist. In this bookcase you will find a diverse range of products from bio-based resilient products like linoleum, newly released PVC-free planks that are a great alternative to LVP, red-list free flooring and carbon negative products, to name a few.

As we continue to explore products other than flooring, this list of criteria is at the forefront of our thoughts when researching and exploring other types of materials. Innovative technologies regarding recycling plastics (molecular recycling) and using fungi to break down products are just a few advancements that have come to our attention recently (see links below for more information on these manufacturers). It is exciting to see what new innovations manufacturers are investigating and using to push the industry in the right direction.

It is the goal of the interiors team to continue researching materials outside of flooring and shape the physical material library in the office for the betterment of our planet and its inhabitants. Ultimately, we envision the material library to only contain healthy materials and eventually eliminate products that do not adhere to our criteria.

The architectural side of the office is also making strides to advance their efforts in sustainability by researching energy modeling, studying carbon offsets and product specification. The Pivot North team is actively putting together our own Climate Action Plan so stay tuned to learn more about our progression!