
At NeoCon 2017 Mohawk Group was awarded a Best of NeoCon Gold for its new product, the Lichen Collection. Now, through a third party certification process, it has received “Petal Certification” under the Living Product Challenge (LPC) of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). The LPC does for products what the older and more famous Living Building Challenge does for buildings. It attempts to change the paradigm from trying to make products “less bad” to creating products that have a positive impact.

The Living Product Challenge contains seven performance categories called Petals. They are Place, Water, Energy, Health and Happiness, Materials, Equity and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of 20 Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. A product needn’t achieve the requirements of all 20 imperatives to begin to be recognized as having a positive impact, but it must achieve certification in all seven Petals in order to achieve full ”Living Certification.” In the case of Lichen, it has been certified in nine of the 20 imperatives within three of the Petals and has been awarded Petal Certification.
Learn everything you need to know about the Living Product Challenge here.
I first became aware of the International Living Future Institute when its founder Jason McLennan spoke at the BIFMA Leadership Conference three years ago. I was inspired by the creativity and commitment of Mr. McLennan, who temporarily put aside his design practice to attempt to change the “green” game, from “less bad” to “positive good.” This is also known as achieving a “net negative” impact.
Now, while still serving as chairman of the Institute, he has gone back to his role as partner and CEO of McLennan Design, a regenerative architecture, planning, design and product design practice on Bainbridge Island, a pleasant ferry ride across the Puget Sound from Seattle, WA.
About a year ago George Bandy Jr. joined Mohawk Group from Interface with an impressive resumé as the past board chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and a stint on the board of Second Nature, a non-profit that champions for higher education institutions to make the principles of sustainability fundamental to every aspect of learning.

In an interview with officeinsight Mr. Bandy said, “I’ve known Jason for 20 or so years. He was on one of the consulting teams when I was the University Sustainability Officer for the University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston. So when he was doing his work around the Living Future, we were already connected. When I started at Mohawk and saw what the company was doing around transparency and the Living Building Challenge for the Light Lab [Mohawk Group’s design center], I started to think about how we might collaborate to bring a product to market based on biophilic design that focused on the concepts of handprinting and material transparency. [Ed. note: “handprinting” is an IFLI concept for looking forward to positive impacts rather the looking backward at our negative “footprints”]
When our team, led by Jackie Dettmer, Global VP of Design and Product Development, brainstormed the names of firms we might work with on a new product aiming to be certified as a Living Product and incorporating biophilic design principles, McLennan Design was an obvious choice.”
As the Mohawk-McLennan Design team began its collaboration, it included an actual biologist to discuss various things from nature that could be applied to making a modular carpet design beautiful. They looked at water, mosses, lichens and various things found in the ocean. Lichens seemed to resonate with the team, and soon there was a lot of excitement around the various textures and color options that could be achieved using lichens as inspiration. And compared to the degree to which inspiration ends up having a literal influence on the final product in most cases, the visual relationship between lichens in nature and this product is exceptional.
Who would have thought that one of the most ubiquitous organisms on the planet that can’t even be classified as strictly a plant would inspire a beautiful carpet design? Mr. Bandy said, “One of the Petals in the LPC is Beauty, and we are very pleased with how beautiful the product turned out and how closely and obviously linked it is to lichens in nature.”
Innovative precision tufting technology was used to create the Lichen collection, so the textures and colors are more pronounced. It is made with Mohawk’s Duracolor solution dyed premium nylon yarn for permanent stain resistance, and comes standard on EcoFlex NXT, its Red List Free backing. Installed with Flex Lok tabs, it is the only Red List Free carpet installation system in the marketplace.
Beauty aside, one of the first Petals Mohawk went after was “Place.” The product line is produced in the company’s facilities in Glasgow, VA, and protecting and improving the eco-region was of primary importance. Glasgow is situated in a certified National Wildlife habitat at the confluence of the Maury and James Rivers, making it part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and it is near the Appalachian Trail. Mohawk is a founding member of “Businesses for the Bay.” The town is also designated an official Appalachian Trail Community, and Mohawk will donate a percentage of Lichen sales to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

The Water Petal was also pursued. As we reported after NeoCon, the team came up with a creative solution for saving more water than the production of Lichen requires. In order to establish how much water needed to be saved, the team calculated the amount of water used in its best selling product line and used that number to establish Lichen’s water offset target.

One of the things we love about the LPC is that it is very real-world in how it measures impacts. Since Mohawk had previously reduced its water consumption by 35% since 2010, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to meet the demands of the water imperative for this product. So rather than making the imperative specific to the production of Lichen, Mohawk donated water saving bathroom fixtures to Morehouse College that will save more water than Lichen production will consume. In so doing, it made a significant contribution to society beyond the impact of the water saving itself…that strikes me as a “handprint.”
In meeting the Health & Happiness Petal, Mohawk was able to capitalize on its many years of dedication to eliminating toxic materials. As Mr. Bandy said, “When we started on the development of Lichen, Mohawk was miles down the road toward many of the Petals. They had been actively reducing Red List materials and participating in the “Declare Label” program of material transparency before I arrived here. So using our EcoFlex NXT backing with Duracolor Fiber we were able to achieve Red List Free status.”
We wholeheartedly support the efforts of IFLI and congratulate Mohawk on its commitment to sustainability. And we hope to be reporting on more and more products that meet the rigorous demands of the Living Product Challenge in future issues of officeinsight.