This year marks Inzide’s 12th year of partnership with the Interior Awards, having come on board from the start as a founding sponsor. We asked the team to share with us some of their favourite interiors, as well as some thoughts about the Awards programme. Inzide’s managing director Steve Aschebrock explains why Inzide has been well in front of the sustainability curve for some years, and how their trusted product and industry expertise makes Inzide the number one choice for flooring in New Zealand now and into the future.

What new products or innovations does the design industry need to be aware of?

Steve: Interface has launched a new backing for carpet tiles called CQuest Bio. The name reflects perfectly the product’s key parts:

• ‘C’: Naturally carbon-negative backings (cradle-to-gate)
• ‘Quest’: The 20-year journey it has taken to develop the technology and materials to realise a commercially viable, carbon-negative, natural backing solution
• ‘Bio’: The biological ingredients that make up the backing

It’s a huge leap in technology for the industry and something that is being utilised by practices that are serious about reducing embodied carbon in buildings — 12,000m² went into Statistics New Zealand last year and another 5000m² into The University of Auckland’s B201 Building.

What is your company doing to help specifiers and designers reach their clients’ sustainability targets or goals?

Steve: All Interface and nora rubber flooring products are third-party-certified carbon-neutral for the full product lifecycle.

We provide certificates once the product is installed, which state how much carbon was ‘retired’ by choosing Interface or nora flooring. These are given to the specifier, installer and client at the end of the project.

It’s a nice way to thank those involved for contributing to reducing the built environment’s exorbitant footprint.

What future trends, from your market segment, do you see on the horizon for the architecture and design industry?

Steve: Reducing the embodied carbon in buildings is becoming the new benchmark. Education and awareness of true, measurable sustainability markers of materials that can be third-party verified are becoming widespread now. Specifically, toxicity (low VOCs), embodied carbon and Green Star acceptance. HPD (Health Product Declarations) are becoming common in Europe and we will certainly see these become adopted here. We already have HPDs available for half of the products we sell in New Zealand.

If there was one thing you would like the industry to know about your company, what would that be?

Steve: As a growing flooring solution provider, we continue to lead in setting benchmarks that our competitors are either unable to understand or are just very slow at achieving. Inzide has been a Toitū net-carbon-zero certified organisation for 16 years.

We remain the only flooring supplier certified by the Ministry for the Environment for our ReEntry recycling carpet tile programme. We were the first to launch recycled fishing-net yarn nine years ago. We’re currently the only carpet tile provider with bio-based negative-carbon backings. We carbon neutralise all our Interface sales – carpet tile, luxury vinyl tile (LVT) and nora rubber.

We’re rated #1 (unsolicited) for service delivery among the flooring contractor community. And we love bringing the best of the world to New Zealand. It’s why we get up every morning with smiles on our faces and a swagger in our step. We’re good at what we do and we love doing it.

From the brands they supply to the New Zealand market, to the processes they follow, Inzide are committed to maintaining and improving their standards. They strongly believe in the circular economy and practice this ethos through Interface’s ReEntry recycling scheme in Australia, among other sustainable initiatives such as Toitū’s carbon zero programme.

In 26 years of supplying sustainable flooring solutions, Inzide has achieved (as at 31 March, 2022):
• 516 tonnes of carpet tile recycled/re-used
• 6261 tonnes of carbon offset
• 304 tonnes of carbon mitigated
• 363,250 litres of fuel saved by using a Hybrid/PHEV car fleet

It all starts with local companies investing in New Zealand’s economy and biosphere to make a real difference to our world.