Specifier guide, Vermont
The engineered floor that uses one-eighth the timber
Every real-wood floor carries a quiet cost: the slow-grown hardwood it consumes. Vermont’s hybrid construction was designed to deliver a genuine wood floor from roughly an eighth of the solid timber a conventional multi-layer board needs, and it has the third-party numbers to show for it.
The hidden cost of a wood floor: how much wood
A conventional multi-layer engineered board is a thick sawn oak wear layer bonded to a plywood or HDF core. That sawn lamella, often three to six millimetres of solid hardwood, is where most of the floor’s slow-grown timber goes. Multiply it across a large commercial floor and the volume of mature oak in the specification is significant, with all the land, time and carbon that growing it represents.
One-eighth the solid timber
Vermont changes the maths. Its surface is a thin slice of real timber pressed together with a wood-powder layer, a dense composite made largely from wood-industry by-products. Because the genuine wood face is thin and the structure beneath does the hard work, the construction uses roughly an eighth of the solid wood of conventional multi-layer parquet to deliver a comparable real-wood floor. You get the wood you can see and feel; you simply use far less of the slow-grown resource to get it.
Approximately one-eighth the solid timber of conventional multi-layer parquet for a comparable real-wood surface, with the wood-powder layer drawing on wood-industry by-products rather than fresh sawn hardwood.
Certified and measured, not asserted
The resource story is backed by independent credentials rather than marketing claims:
| Credential | What it covers |
|---|---|
| PEFC-certified timber | The wood is sourced from sustainably managed forests under chain-of-custody certification. |
| Blue Angel ecolabel | One of the most demanding whole-life environmental ecolabels, assessing the product across its life cycle. |
| EPD to EN 15804 | A third-party Environmental Product Declaration. The declared cradle-to-gate stage (A1–A3) is −8.74 kg CO₂e/m². |
That negative figure is not a typo. At the cradle-to-gate stage, the carbon stored in the timber (biogenic carbon locked into the floor) outweighs the emissions of harvesting and manufacturing it, so the declared A1–A3 result comes out below zero. It is the same way our cork range reads negative on a life-cycle balance: the material is, in part, a carbon store.
Where it sits in our sustainability story
Each of our ranges earns its place differently. Cork is carbon-negative on a full life-cycle balance and naturally renewable; Organic is PVC-free and bio-based with zero added VOCs; Vermont is the resource-efficient real-wood option, the same warmth as solid oak from a fraction of the timber. For the full picture and the supporting declarations, see our sustainable flooring hub.
The honest whole-life picture
We will be precise rather than sweeping. The −8.74 figure is the A1–A3 (cradle-to-gate) stage of the EPD, not a whole-life carbon-neutral claim for the finished, installed and maintained floor, later life-cycle stages depend on use and end-of-life, and a natural-oil finish adds periodic re-oiling. What is solid is the resource case: far less slow-grown hardwood per square metre, certified sourcing, a long service life, and a floor you recoat rather than replace. For a real-wood floor, that is a strong sustainability position, honestly stated.