wallteriors blog: Wallteriors- A perfect shade of green at IWCE 2008

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Wallteriors- A perfect shade of green at IWCE 2008

Atlanta,March 26–29, 2008:

Wallteriors was selected to be the eco-friendly wallcovering represented in the Green Pavillion at the International Window Coverings EXPO (IWCE): The Green Design Pavilion, presented by TODL.com, was a hands-on, touch and feel exhibit of green design alternatives from all areas of design - window coverings, flooring, green wallcovering, furniture, and more from a variety of sources. This booth was filled with product and ideas that helped demystify the green-design process, provided attendees and exhibitors alike with resources and information about eco-friendly products. Green is not a trend - it's a way of life.

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About our products

We pride ourselves in our attention to detail. Our goal is to maintain a relationship with our clients that is built on complete satisfaction, start to finish! Wallteriors is highly successful in all aspects of custom work. Our specialty is high quality hand crafted wall coverings which are made in various shapes and textures, with other specialty details and no up charge. Select squares, rectangles, torn pieces, panels and even traditional rolls. Panels or rolls can be up to 30’ long or cut by us to any size in between. The majority of our collections offer a selection of standard widths 12’’, 18’’, 24’’ and 36’’. Finally, we give you the choice of selecting an edge detail, hand torn and stained or straight edge.

All products are hand made in our studio / office, located in Palm Springs California, USA.

Our staff experience includes:

Wall covering Design
Color Specialist
Interior Design
Fine Art
Business
Customer Service
Sales and Marketing
Manufacturing
Paint Finishing
Wall covering Installation
Showroom Experience

With these talents we have formed a professional company that understands all aspects of making walls beautiful. Please browse through our website.

Discover the advantages of Wallteriors and
get your walls talking!

Made by hand

Wallteriors handcrafted wallcoverings have been made under the philosophy of being eco conscious and earth friendly for the past 24 years. Wallteriors has been operating with the planet in mind for many years before most companies were thinking about green manufacturing.

All of our products are created with no machinery or power tools. All of our paints are mixed by hand, our designs are hand painted and then finally our wall covering is cut by hand.

Our studios, located in Palm Springs, CA, take advantage of our dry desert environment which eliminates the necessity of any drying equipment and the power needed for artificial drying systems.

Paints, Paper and Sealant products

All our paints, sealants and glues are water based acrylic products. Wallteriors uses only non toxic mediums. All our paints comply with our strict local Air Quality Agency standards. In our county here in Southern California, Wallteriors and all other manufacturers are required to meet the standards set by our South Coast Management District whose standards are actually even higher than those of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

Our paint products contain zero to 50 g/l VOC’s. Our main paint supplier, ICI Paints, was the first in the industry to develop water based latex paints and zero VOC paints. http://www.icipaintstores.com/.
All graphic paints used fall under a different standards from LEED and South Coast Management District Rule #113/ VOC limit is 500g/l .Graphic paints we use are on the average 100 g/l well below limits. Wallteriors employs heavy Kraft substrates which have 47% recycled fibers, OCC (Post Consumer Waste): 25% and Internal waste: 22%. All our other paper products are 100% recycled. Wallteriors only purchases from local vendors in order to keep energy and resources required by shipping to a minimum.

We recommend Professional Ultra Clear Adhesive Pro-880 for installation which meets or exceeds LEED guidelines, it is a vegetable based and water soluble product. http://www.romandecoratingproducts.com/

Wallteriors creative studios and offices are green

Even before we ever heard the term “environmental footprint”, we’ve always been watching where we’re stepping.

From our paint studios to our offices, Wallteriors has long been concerned with the impact we’re making on the planet and the overall health of all our employees. The desert location of our offices and studios in Palm Springs, CA provides us with a unique ability to operate our facilities with a minimum footprint on the land. During the months when we require cooling systems we now use evaporative coolers that run on low voltage motors, use recirculating water and save a great deal of electricity.

We are moving towards being a paperless office. With the use off computers we have minimized our need to file our daily paper work. We also are asking our clients and suppliers to communicate with us via internet for invoices, P.O.’s and other business forms to eliminate paper normally used in faxing.

All our lighting has been converted to T-8 fluorescent tubes with high efficiency electronic ballasts. By making this change we are saving over 40% of our lighting costs, we are lowering our cooling costs and using less power with bulbs that last longer while providing illumination that more closely resembles natural light than our old fluorescents.

Our local energy department has a great program which provided us with a free retrofit that saved us over $5,000. Please visit http://www.sce.com/ for details.

Shipping & Packaging

All Wallteriors wallcoverings are manufactured with American made materials here in our studios in Palm Springs, CA. Our client base is chiefly here in the U.S., we greatly minimize shipping costs and energy use. Most wall covering companies may have U.S. offices but manufacture or import raw materials from distant foreign countries. Also these overseas facilities generally have little or no production and emission regulations to uphold. The boxes and packaging we use are comprised of at least 40% recycled fibers.
We are fortunate that our local UPS facility is literally down the street which reduces energy use in sending our shipments.

Waste

All our products are made to order so that each time there is little to no waste. We utilize our local recycling centers for all possible excess materials. Our surplus paints are either donated to a local charity which offers building materials to assist those in need and unusable excess paint is carefully allowed to dry before disposal to prevent leakage.

One of the best design features of our products also prevents waste of the product itself during installation. We encourage Wallteriors to be installed with our interesting pre-cut shapes. Our squares, rectangles or torn pieces drastically reduce the typical unused, excess material which is the byproduct of traditional wall covering. When installing standard “roll” wallpaper, the doors, windows and other architectural features one encounters become large areas of material which generally have to be discarded in order to maintain a pattern or even just the regulated seams. With the combination of Wallteriors system of “tiling” ones surfaces in pieces and our abstract patterns, one may even use small scraps to complete installations successfully. Leftover pieces may even be used for any future maintenance as one just glues a new piece of our wall covering over the problem area. You fix the spot and not the whole wall! Also, thanks to the textural aspects of most of our designs, labor and material preparations are greatly minimized.

Marketing Wallteriors Green

Recently our sample department has developed a way to save 75% of the paper products used to present our wall covering samples in our catalogs. All our catalogs are assembled by hand and include real samples of our handcrafted wall covering. We also have moved away from the concept of traveling sales reps by opening our Las Vegas showroom at the Las Vegas World Market Center http://www.lasvegasmarket.com/ and establishing relationships with representative showrooms and dealers. By positioning our presence in a high traffic area with a built in visitor profile of design professionals we not only have increased business but have vastly reduced unnecessary energy use and the costly resources consumed by traveling. Our website, http://www.wallteriors.com/ enables our clients to keep up to date with our company’s current products as well as proving to be a valuable sales tool.

24 years ago the word “green” was not considered a desirable company. Back then, Wallteriors founder Hector Romero realized the importance of having an environmentally friendly work environment where his young children could run around safely and without fear. Wallteriors wallcovering proves that sustainable design can be beautiful. It is our hope that by providing some of our ideas, standards and discoveries that we live and work by that others may be inspired to not just jump on “the green bandwagon” but earnestly continue to work on improving the green standards of their home or business and hopefully, teach us here at Wallteriors how we can improve too.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Wallteriors- A perfect shade of green at IWCE 2008

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