Recently, a fitness industry publication asked several club developers and interior designers who specialize in club design, what they foresaw in the future of club design and construction. While clearly these experts can only speculate about what will be the future designs of fitness, their thoughts are worth considering and are probably as accurate as anyone else’s guess as to what we’ll see in the next 20 years.
One of the things that caught my eye was that there was a recurring theme of using more “green materials” in the construction of health clubs, and I’ve seen this mentioned a number of times lately in articles written about fitness center construction. The definition of green materials can be a bit hazy and really depends upon whom you ask, but typically it refers to those products whose manufacturing or harvesting has minimal impact on the environment. It’s hard to find someone who’s against that and we should all certainly be mindful of the effect our actions make on the environment.
What I can’t answer is: How much greener can materials be than those already used in the fitness industry? At least in the surfaces that we typically utilize, the fitness industry already uses exceptionally green products – much more so than most industries, and it’s something of which we should be proud.
Let’s take our weight room and CV area flooring. Ten to 15 years ago, this was either commercial carpet or virgin rubber, both of which required high concentrations of petroleum products to produce. Today, many of these areas utilize either rubber flooring that is recycled, or recycled carpeting. Both of these products are exceptionally green, typically being made from reground automobile tires – which had no commercial marketability until the last several years. This actually reduces waste that, until recently, went into landfills. Both rubber flooring and synthetic carpet can also be reground and recycled again, so it’s hard to argue that there’s a much greener product than that.
As for court sports and group exercise, we typically utilize wood flooring. We all read about the decimation of the forest around the globe and its effect on our worldwide environment. However, that’s not the case with the wood flooring in your club. Virtually all of those floors are from mills in the western hemisphere and as such, are from sustainable forests. While there was a time, up into the 1800s, in which loggers in this country clear-cut forests and simply moved on to the next one, that’s not economically feasible any longer. The harvested wood of today is replenished with new plantings, which will not be harvested for several years. These new trees can be planted time and time again, and as they grow, consuming only water and sunlight.
There are often references made to two of possibly the greenest products that can be manufactured into wood flooring – cork and bamboo. Cork is manufactured by removing about 50% of the bark of a cork oak tree, grinding the bark and gluing these bark pieces together into blocks, which are then shaved to make flooring pieces. Bamboo is actually a grass and as such, grows about a third faster than a hardwood tree. The bamboo is also cut into slices, and these slices are then adhered together and milled to create flooring planks. The harvesting of these materials, from either of these two species, does not kill the plant – and the typical bamboo, for instance, will be ready to be harvested again in a period of three to five years.
The reason that these varieties of flooring have not yet had wide acceptance in the fitness market is that they simply have not yet been tested for performance in sports. As most flooring manufacturers have invested heavily in the futures of western hemisphere forests, I’m not sure how likely we are to find a reason to change to these more foreign sources.
While exotic plants – including bamboo, cork and even palm trees – are certainly renewable at a faster rate than the growth of newly planted trees, they are no more sustainable than the current species of trees that we typically use for flooring – including maple, oak and beech – from managed forests. I’ve found that virtually all hardwood manufacturers are very socially responsible when it comes to replantings, and it also simply makes economic sense to provide for tracts that can be forested in the future.
So, rest assured that the building products that are in your facility are likely extremely green already. If green building products are especially important to you, ask the manufacturers of the flooring you are purchasing about the percent of recycled content in their rubber products, or whether the hardwood flooring they supply is from sustainable forests. I think you’ll be very satisfied by the answers that you get.
Your members will appreciate an environmentally responsible club, which can mean even more “green” in your club’s pocket!
Steve Chase is the General Manager of Fitness Flooring. He can be contacted at 866.735.5113, or by email atexerflex@exerflex.com, or visit www.exerflex.com.
