Repurposing Olympic Graphics

You notice that whenever you step down onto your home’s newly installed flooring, you have a strange urge to try a triple salchow or maybe a quadruple back somersault. Well, don’t begin training for the 2014 Games just yet. It may be because your new flooring was once part of this year’s Winter Olympic Games.

The building- and vehicle-wrap graphics supplied by 3M Canada for the 2010 Olympic Games as well as the Paralympic Winter Games were reclaimed and recycled post-event, and turned into flooring materials—diverting approximately 200,000 square feet of material from Canadian landfill sites.

When the graphics were removed from Olympic vehicles and Vancouver venues such as the Richmond Olympic Oval and the Pacific Coliseum, they were consolidated and shipped to Mannington Mills the New Jersey-based manufacturer of residential and commercial flooring. Since the graphic materials share chemistry with raw materials used in the manufacturing process, the materials become a key ingredient in a mixture used to make high-recycled-content flooring. Leveraging its experience in repurposing various building materials into hard surface flooring, Mannington was able to develop a way of recycling post-use, adhesive-backed graphic materials.

“One of the simplest ways to conserve resources is to reuse what you can. Many other materials have found second lives as flooring products through Mannington’s unique process, and we’re thrilled they can accommodate the graphics produced by 3M Canada,” says Richard Chartrand, 3M Canada’s vice president, display and graphics business. “This arrangement was not only a great way to support the environmental efforts of 3M Canada…it also made very good business sense.”

3M
www.3m.com

MANNINGTON MILLS
www.mannington.com