We Believe In Giving Back
As part of our commitment to believe in better, Mohawk Group has embarked on the journey of creating handprints over footprints through the Living Product Challenge. This International Living Future Institute (ILFI) program provides a framework for manufacturers to reimagine the design and construction of products to function as elegantly and efficiently as anything found in the natural world.
With a full suite of Living Products across carpet and hard surface, Mohawk Group is setting a higher standard to help ensure products contribute to healthy spaces, are designed to inspire and will give more back to the environment than they take through unique “handprinting” initiatives.
What is Handprinting?
Unlike footprints, which measure a product’s negative impact, handprints measure a product’s positive impact across its life cycle.
Handprints can measure environmental impacts as well as social and economic impacts. In all cases, the idea is simply to give back more than we take. The hope is to achieve a ripple effect, in which our positive actions spur further positive actions, whether upstream, downstream or tangential to us.
The Living Product Challenge requires a product to have a net-positive impact on resources – that is, Living Products must have a larger handprint than footprint.
Ultimately, what we learn from handprinting is that it is not enough simply to do “less bad” – we must do more good.