During the last decades, Engineered Wood Flooring and Laminated Flooring experienced dramatic increase in demand from consumers in Europe and Asia, and those two products have taken large market share to the traditional hardwood strip flooring and to other floor covering material like textile, vinyl, etc. In North America, these new multi-layer parquets are just taking off, in 1997, Engineered Wood Flooring share of hardwood flooring was 34% and growing fast. This compares with a market share of 67% in Europe. There appears to be much room for growth in North America. The rapid increase of hardwood flooring products in the world in recent years associated with the decrease of available hardwood raw material made the multi-layer and laminated flooring products interesting alternatives for the hardwood flooring industry. Canada is an important supplier of the hardwood raw material for the European production of both hardwood and EW Floorings. Since some volumes of EWF production from Europe are exported to North America, we do not see any reason why they should not be manufactured in Canada with a competitive advantage. The window of opportunity is there to be exploited.
High Pressure Laminate flooring, a composite product made of High Density Fiberboard (HDF) overlaid by coated paper and presenting a very high-resistance surface finish, is also growing very fast in the U.S. The focus was less on this product in this report since contrarily to EWF, HPL flooring is already being produced in Canada. Also a high capacity for manufacturing this product is currently being built in S-E Asia and in China and we know these countries are low-cost producers, very hard to compete with.
Standards and methods for testing such products were reviewed. It was observed that the European market is very much standard driven, German standards leading the way in that respect. North American are more driven by "lifetime limited warranties”, although some voluntary standards have been defined by the industry. In any case, all testing methods that were observed in these standards can be performed in Forintek materials testing laboratories.
The main problems associated with such products are certainly their negative reaction to variation of moisture content. In this report, methods for predicting those reactions were elaborated in terms of quality of construction and performance. More specifically, testing methods were defined, tried and found to be effective to test surface planeity, gap formation associated with shrinkage and cupping. A process quality control method was also proposed to help eventual producers to control their gluing process. Certainly more research needs to be done to find the best parameters in terms of products and methods of production to develop high quality products that consumers will like to use in their home. Additional research is also required in order to find which backing and core materials could provide the future Canadian EWF industry a sustainable competitive advantage.