Sustainability Strategy

Sustainability permeates all aspects of Mohawk's operations and organization. We view sustainability as a strategic business imperative dedicated to providing our customers and consumers with safe and environmentally friendly flooring products. We strongly seek to implement sustainable business initiatives that have a quantifiable return, as we believe such initiatives offer the best opportunity to realize a significant impact and lasting success.

We have learned a tremendous amount in the 18 months since our corporate sustainability function was formed. Investments in data management have enabled us to improve data acquisition, consistency and integrity. This data is invaluable to enhancing our understanding of the source and extent of our environmental impact.

Mohawk is committed to an ethic of continuous improvement in all three areas of sustainability – economic, environmental and social. In 2009, we chose to focus primarily on environmental goals because they offer quantifiable metrics by which to measure our progress. This year's sustainability report, our second edition, already has made significant strides in expanding our report to other areas of sustainability, in particular, social indicators. In doing so, we have encountered data collection challenges with respect to our various business units. Our businesses currently utilize different human resource systems and operate under different local regulations in different parts of the world. As a result, our corporate-level reporting is not as robust as we would like. We have committed to work toward increasing the level of standardization across the enterprise so that we can better measure and monitor our progress. Our intent is to realize more standardization by 2012-2013.

Our strategy involves a three-pronged approach that focuses on our processes, our products and our people. Our processes involve both green and blue strategies. These strategies focus on optimizing energy consumption and seeking innovative energy alternatives, minimizing the amount of water used to conduct our business, creating innovative ways of reclaiming water that is used, and maximizing reuse and recycling of process waste in order to reduce waste to landfill.

Our product strategy also seeks to maximize the amount of recycled or renewable content in all products. Going forward, we will work to hold our suppliers increasingly to the highest business and ethical standards in order to ensure that all imported or domestically sourced products are manufactured using fair labor standards and are packaged with re-use or recycling in mind. We are committed to developing processes that will make it easier for customers to recycle products that are at the end of their useful lives.

Our people strategy seeks to employ fair labor practices and encourages involvement between our employees and the communities in which we live and work. Likewise, as a Company, we work to be a good corporate citizen by actively supporting and participating in those communities and organizations that positively impact our employees.