Our visit to Forbo Factory in the Netherlands

At Green Building Supply, we love visiting our vendors' manufacturing facilities to get behind the scenes and see how things are made. We do this to provide you with more accurate information.

As dealers of Forbo Marmoleum for more than 25 years, we have long dreamed of visiting their factory in Holland. However, year after year we asked to visit but were turned down because no one from the US has ever been invited, not even the US sales managers.

For some reason, and we may never know why, the management at Forbo agreed to allow our team members to be the first people from the US to tour their entire factory in the Netherlands. We were thrilled and honored.

Our two-day tour began at the factory in Assendelft, which is about an hour and a half from Amsterdam. The factory buildings appeared to be about 50-75 years old, yet some parts were still original from 1898 and in good condition. This is one of several factories owned by Forbo; the others are in Scotland and Germany.

Forbo is a multinational public company that distributes a variety of flooring products in almost all countries worldwide. The factory we visited only makes Marmoleum sheeting, while the other factories make Marmoleum Composition Tile (MCT), Marmoleum Cinch Loc Seal click flooring, and construction adhesives.

All of the Marmoleum products are made with the same natural ingredients: linseed oil, limestone, tree resins, mineral pigments, wood flour/cork flour, and jute. We got to see them mix all these together. About 62% of the ingredients are sourced from renewable resources both locally and internationally; the rest come from recycled materials. The Marmoleum flooring is biodegradable, recyclable, and can be repurposed at the end of its life cycle.

Linseed oil | pine tree rosin | wood flour | limestone | pigments | jute

We spent the first few hours of our visit learning about Forbo’s commitment to sustainability. They showed us where they source all these natural materials; how they recycle cork and wood; how linseed oil is extracted from flax seeds; how all the colorful minerals had to be brought in from various countries; and how they efficiently store and organize these materials and then distribute them worldwide.

Their passion for non-toxic and natural materials in their Marmoleum products was incorporated into every fabric of their manufacturing, certifications, marketing, and throughout their buildings.

The use of all of their flooring was on full display everywhere we turned. Their offices, hallways, restrooms, and dining halls are all decked out with different colors and styles of Marmoleum. It is used on floors, desktops, seats, and walls, and it was a real feast for the eyes. It made the entire place vibrant, lively, and fun to walk through.

Due to the different stages the raw materials must go through, it took us two days to complete our tour. Unfortunately, photos were not allowed inside the plant. However, what we saw was a clean, orderly factory which confirmed the safety of this material.

At the beginning of the tour we witnessed how linoleum cement is made. They start by mixing linseed oil, tree rosins, and wood flour together. The linseed oil causes the entire mix to heat up almost to the burning point. The large containers of linoleum cement were giving off so much heat that within five minutes we broke into a sweat and had to leave that room immediately.

Once the linoleum cement cooled down, pigments were added. This is the fun part. At this point we asked, “How do you create colors so consistently?” They said they used a very old-school system, much like baking bread: there is a different recipe for each color, using ½ cup of one pigment, ¼ cup of another, and so on. It is simple, but effective.

At this point, they surprised us by escorting us into a large sample room, where they told us we could create our own Marmoleum colors. Wow, that was unexpected and sounded like fun. The sample room is like a mini factory for experimentation, where you can test different color combinations and produce real, live samples.

They gave us six containers of mineral pigments to choose from and a glass jar to fill with whatever colors we wanted in whatever quantities we wanted.

Here are some examples of what the finished samples looked like.

We made two samples per person. They tossed our pigments into a large commercial blender with some pre-made linoleum cement and then ran it through a press (called calendering), which compressed it all together. The combinations of pigments did not turn out to be anything like what we expected, but they were all unique and intriguing.

Once the marmoleum is calendered, it has to cure for one to two weeks. The initial length of each sheet of raw Marmoleum is a few thousand feet long x 66 inches wide, which is very heavy and awkward to handle. The conveyor belts move these sheets into a very tall room in order to cure the Marmoleum.

Rather than being laid flat to dry, the Marmoleum is draped over a round wooden pole mounted 50 feet high near the ceiling. There are roughly 25 poles spaced 3 feet apart. Each loop of Marmoleum went up 50 feet over the pole and down 50 feet again until all 25 poles were covered. (See right hand side of image below.)

There are thousands of linear feet of Marmoleum in each room, and there are hundreds of individual drying rooms in a long row as far as the eye could see.

Finally, at the end of our tour, we were allowed to take photos of their massive warehouse filled with what looked like millions of rolls of Marmoleum as far as the eye could see. These rolls are all standing upright after being inserted over the tops of vertical stanchions by an automated rolling gantry crane, and then removed as orders come in to sell them.