Valley Forge Fabrics receives Best Practice award
Honored for environmental efforts by Sustainable Florida program
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, July 28, 2008
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Valley Forge Fabrics was recently honored by Sustainable Florida with a Best Practice award in the Large Company Category.
The winners were announced June 9 at the 10th annual Sustainable Florida awards program in Tallahassee. Valley Forge and the other honorees were recognized with a resolution on July 29th by Governor Charlie Crist.
Sustainable Florida is an alliance of business, government and civic leaders, and organizations committed to defining excellence for Florida’s economic, environmental and social future.
Winners of the best practices award were selected by an independent panel of nine representatives from private and public sectors involved in the sustainability movement.
Valley Forge, 30-year-old fabric source, was selected for a number of reasons. It has a product called FRESH – Fabrics Redefining Environmental Standards for Hospitality. The fabric line is of made from recycled PET plastic bottles. Using FRESH saves natural resources since the hospitality industry standard – non-recycled polyester – is made from petroleum.
The fabric feels like cotton and exceeds all fire codes, abrasion and longevity requirements for use in hotels.
Once FRESH fabrics reach the end of their life cycle, Valley Forge reclaims the fabric and re-recycles the materials into blankets, fiberfill inserts, filling for pillows and cushions or plastics for automotive interiors. A Valley Forge spokesperson said that it is only textile company to date that has an established reclamation process to facilitate the recycling of textiles.
In addition to producing a green product, Valley Forge operates in a sustainable manner by greening its fleet and implementing a mandatory internal recycling program.
“Each nominee is outstanding and doing extremely innovative things to better the environment,” said Tim Center, director of Sustainable Florida. “Among this group, Valley Forge Fabrics was an undiscovered gem in Florida. They have changed the economic landscape by doing great things for the economy and at the same time doing it environmentally.”
Diana Dobin, senior vice president at Valley Forge, said “The fact that we won this award is a testament to Valley Forge’s dedication to its goals and a measurement of how much what we do with FRESH matters. So we are, of course, motivated to do even more.”
Sustainable Florida is an independent, non-partisan program of the Collins Center for Public Policy.
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