100% polypropylene is what our tiles are made from and they are talc free as well. There is no shortage of technical or commercial arguments when it comes to describing the material used for our tiles, but what exactly is it?
You may not know it yet, but you use polypropylene often, and it’s a safe bet that you already have it in your home, as polypropylene is a common, easy-to-use and durable material.
Polypropylene, with the acronym PP (or PPi), is a semi-crystalline thermoplastic polymer for mass consumption (bottles, bottle caps… furniture, etc. ). Its exceptional resistance to fatigue makes it a material of choice for parts that must be deformed (joint between two moving technical parts, for example).
Physical properties of polypropylene
- Young’s modulus: 1.1 to 1.6 GPa . (this is the “resistance” of a material)
- Shrinkage: 1 to 2.5%.
- Density: from 0.89 to 0.91g/cm3
- Chemical resistance: Good
- Type of polypropylene used: Grade A virgin
- Recyclability: 100%
- Thermal conductivity: 0.330 m2 K/W
- Electrical resistance: -1020 ohms
Injected polypropylene (on injection presses) is a material that is extremely easy to recycle, so it is one of the responsible materials.
Virgin polypropylene is translucent to opaque, hydrophobic (not afraid of water), hard, semi-rigid and very resistant to abrasion.
Propylene can form homopolymers (polypropylene), random copolymers or “block” copolymers.
The density (ie the mass (weight) compared to a volume) ranges from 0.89 to 0.91 (between 890 and 910 grams per litre).
The advantages of polypropylene
Polypropylene has many advantages, both industrial and in use: its reasonable cost makes it accessible, can be food safe (odourless and non-toxic), tear-proof, very resistant to fatigue and bending, very low density, chemically inert, sterilisable and 100% recyclable! It’s also an excellent electrical insulator.
We manufacture our tiles by injection process and injection press. Thanks to this method, we can do almost what we want in terms of shape.
The most significant advantages:
- Extremely robust material that stands the test of time.
- Rot-proof – whatever the environment, even extreme humidity.
- Coloured in the mass (by adding colour pigments during the melting of the material before injection)
- A stable material over time, which can shape to heat variations and return to its initial shape at room temperature.
- Temperature resistant material, resistant to temperature peaks from -30°C to 100°C.
- 100% recyclable material.
- Abrasion resistant material, making it perfectly suitable for commercial or professional use.
- Chosen for its very good acoustics, the polypropylene floor tiles offer great sound comfort when walking, thus making your floor quieter.
- A material that can be used outdoors.
At FLEXSPEC, what type of Polypropylene do we use?
The various applications of our tiles, such as use in residential garages, in showrooms, on terraces or around swimming pools and even in workshops, are demanding applications that sometimes put the floor to the test.
The choice of materials then becomes one of the demands of creating a resistant floor, and of quality that lasts.
At FLEXSPEC, we’ve made the choice since the creation of the brand to produce our floor tiles only with the best materials available on the market, sourcing from market leaders, and only with virgin polypropylene .
Why Virgin Polypropylene?
One of the main reasons for using 100% virgin (new) polypropylene is to obtain perfectly duplicable and visually pure colours.
But the most important thing is to obtain a material with constant properties , in terms of rigidity, resistance, and dimensional stability. A product that lasts over time. This is why all our polypropylene tiles are guaranteed for at least 10 years!
In fact, the use of recycled materials doesn’t make it possible to obtain perfectly identical colours for each production due to the colorisation instability of the base material. In addition, recycled polypropylene granules are mostly dark (from dark grey to black), thus making the manufacture of light colours impossible, and bright colours very uncertain.
Is there any talc in FLEXSPEC products?
FLEXSPEC does not use talc in the manufacture of its tiles.
Talc is a very cheap material that some competitors will add to the composition of their tiles up to 12% in order to reduce manufacturing costs.
Technically it is acceptable for certain so-called “non-aesthetic” uses, but this will cause the material to lose a large part of its UV resistance, making the tiles “white / bleached” quickly in outdoor use. This is why all our tiles are talc-free during manufacture, making them as UV stable as possible.
In addition, talc will tend to make the tiles brittle, and less resilient, as can be seen on tiles of competitors.
This is why we strongly recommend to choosing tiles without added talc.
Thank you for reading, if you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.