The Contract Flooring Association, CFA, is the main industry body representing the Contract Flooring Sector in the UK. It has four main categories of membership for Flooring Contractors, Manufacturers, Distributors & Consultants. The CFA was formed in 1974 with the main purpose of providing sector support and business benefits for Contractor members. This remains its focus although CFA is increasingly recognized as offering support across the flooring supply chain and its main categories of membership.  The Contract Flooring Association is active in providing business benefits to members and drive the creation and maintenance of technical information and industry standards.

As a leading trade body in its sector, CFA has an extremely strong network of approximately 325 flooring contractors and 68 manufacturers (Jan 2022). It also leads in terms of best practice and technical standards, which gives it a prime position to support and recommend companies that can help with trials. Equally, it provides regular updates to members and as such its ability to disseminate information, opportunity and advancements is evident as well part of what CFA is known for. The Contract Flooring Association publishes an annual sustainability supplement through its journal CFJ.

CFA’s reach across the flooring supply chain makes it ideally suited to carry out work within the CISUFLO project by:

  • Being a bridge to the installers
  • Providing feedback on business modelling
  • Installing the circular flooring products which will result from the project
  • Disseminating findings to a wide range of stakeholders in the floor covering sector
  • Facilitating the take up of the new concepts developed within CISUFLO

In the commercial flooring market, CFA is acutely aware of its responsibility to ensure that the products installed continue to improve their sustainability. Critical thinking suggests that one of the best ways to do that is to make and install products which can remain within a circular model. The Contract Flooring Association recently published its recent Zero Avoidable Waste (ZAW) report which highlighted this. The study showed that design for recycling and reuse is a clear focus of the sector and that collaboration outside of the flooring industry is key if Zero Avoidable Waste is to be achieved.

The CFA is therefore delighted to be supporting the CISUFLO project and thereby contributing to the development of a circular economy for the flooring sector.