Mannington Mills is a fourth-generation, family-owned business with nine locations and more than 2,000 employees worldwide. Based in Salem, New Jersey, the company will celebrate its 100^th anniversary in 2015. The company has seen rising demand for its flooring products, which include not only hardwood flooring and porcelain, but also rubber tile and luxury vinyl tile that are increasingly in demand in healthcare, educational, and industrial settings. Rubber flooring is increasingly popular because of its durability and comfort underfoot. Due to growing demand, the company has already added capacity at its San Jose, California, plant, and is expanding its Madison, Georgia plant by 45,000 square feet in a project that will be completed by 2016. More than 200 new jobs are expected once the new plant is operational.

The company’s executives see the expansion in Georgia, where it operates two plants that it purchased in 2012, as part of its own commitment to bring manufacturing of luxury vinyl tile back to the U.S. Eight of Mannington’s nine locations are in the U.S., with the other in Great Britain. In addition to Georgia and California, the company manufactures in New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, and Alabama..

No manufacturer survives for 100 years, through the up-and-down business cycles and changing trends in consumer preferences and industrial practices, without being innovative and focused on the long term. Mannington has developed new products and improved existing ones to help meet customers’ needs.

The company is also sharply focused on sustainability. When the company learned about the large amounts of drywall filling landfills, it redesigned its Premium Tile products to use pulverized gypsum reclaimed from construction projects. It also launched a program called LOOP, which recycles hundreds of tons of old flooring (vinyl composition tile) into new products that contain post-consumer recycled content. By 2012, Mannington had recycled more than 20 million pounds of tile.

Mannington’s laminate flooring generally has more than 70 percent recycled content by weight. Its core is made of high-density fiberboard, made from wood shavings and other waste, which is recycled and compressed.

Even engineered hardwood is more environmentally efficient than traditional hardwood, according to the company. With traditional wood flooring, planks are cut out of each log. With engineered hardwood, Mannington peels wood into sheets, which are bonded in cross-grain layers, with more renewable species used for inner piles. The result is a product that is less apt to warp or buckle.

With its Centennial coming in 2015 and a plant expansion set for completion in 2016, Mannington Mills is a Great Manufacturing Story.

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