Crossville’s Sustainable Samples Kit

Samples are a necessary evil in our industry. We depend on them to scheme our projects and aid us with our presentations. We need them. But, they create a lot of waste, both in materials and the energy used to deliver them to us. Most end up in landfills, plus, many manufacturers have confirmed they are a major expense of doing business. There has to be a better way.

Technology and imaging advances have made photographic representations viable. Tryk has been successfully producing facsimile carpet samples for the major manufacturers for a number of years. As they suggest, use their samples for the first round of the design process, reduce your environmental impact and “just feel good knowing that you didn’t send another sample to the landfill or the dark recesses of your office.”

The latest entrant to sample waste reduction is Crossville, the largest domestic porcelain stone tile manufacturer. The company, an excellent model of sustainability, has had a viable tile take-back program in place for some time.  Both samples and previously installed tiles can be sent back to Crossville to find new life in recycled content product.

Its latest endeavor is the introduction of the Sustainable Samples kit, which offers paper "tile" samples created using a high-resolution scanner to capture a near-exact image of each tile. The box contains every tile, every color in Crossville’s porcelain tile collection--that's more than 230 colors--in a compact, lightweight kit that is about 10 x 4 inches. It is intended to help designers make preliminary color and product selections, allowing them to have an entire product line in their libraries in a minimum amount of space.  The back of the tile has a QR code which designers can scan with any smart phone and retrieve more information about the product.

I’ve seen the paper samples. They’re amazing--and what a great initiative!