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California Carpet Culture

Behind our shiny Los Angeles locale, Bentley is a brand firmly rooted in our environmental California culture. We are proud to operate in a state with a strong stance on environmental stewardship, and among California’s constituents, businesses, and communities, there is an overall consensus to do the right thing for people and the planet. The state of California has the most rigorous sustainable manufacturing standards in the nation, practices we as a company whole-heartedly embrace.

Since 1994, Bentley has been measuring, evaluating, and optimizing our manufacturing process and resource metrics at our facility. The life cycle approach we take to evaluating our sustainability performance has demonstrated that 80% or more of the impacts our products have on the environmental stem from the production stage. With this insight, we focus our attention on the manufacturing processes and selection of input materials, because you can’t make green product in a brown environment. If you can make the manufacturing process cleaner and more efficient, you can make carpet green all the way around.

To put this philosophy into action, we re-certified our manufacturing plant last year to LEED® for Existing Buildings: Operations Maintenance at the Gold level. To date, Bentley’s facility is the industry’s only LEED-certified carpet manufacturing plant.

Moreover, we are looking more closely at the materials we source and utilizing components from companies that are demonstrating environmental consciousness. For example, we continue to use Antron® Lumena™ type 6,6 nylon, a certified environmentally preferable fiber. We are also pleased to have vendors like Styron who have a focus on renewable energy. Continuing to identify ways to produce product more sustainably is leading our goal products that cause zero-impact.

Our sustainability efforts also include ensuring our customers understand and feel confident about the material health of our products. We are proud to continue to offer tile and broadloom that are free of PVC and other chemicals of concern found in material red lists. This was one of the key reasons we underwent Cradle to Cradle certification in 2013. The intent of this certification, coupled with our sustainable manufacturing philosophies as a California company, lends itself to the continual optimization of the material health and reutilization of our products.

As members of a materials-intensive industry, Bentley’s goal is to ensure that each facet of the environment we touch continues to grow and thrive, while our company grows and thrives within it. To see us live in action, we invite IIDA SoCal designers to visit us in City of Industry to tour our mill. For more information or to schedule a tour for your firm, visit us on the web at www.BentleyMills.com or call 800.423.4709.

Cameron Grimsley
Bently