When you stop to think about it, you come to realize how much of our lives are spent indoors.

Whether in a personal or professional setting, most of our community spends upwards of 90% of our time indoors¹. It comes as no surprise that we invest in creating spaces we want to inhabit. We carefully consider a building’s aesthetic, functionality, and purpose – but have we given thought to the impact indoor spaces have on our health and wellness?

For Milliken, safety and health has always played a role in how we conduct business. This emphasis, along with our legacy in developing innovative products to enhance daily life, encouraged us to further study indoor environments. Milliken is one of 16 founding members of the Well Living Lab, a collaborative research initiative led by Delos and Mayo Clinic. Well Living Lab combines the best and brightest minds in building science and medical research to explore indoor environments for the purpose of creating healthier spaces in which to live, work, and play.

Well Living Lab is the first scientific research center using exclusively human-centered research to understand the interaction between health and well-being, and indoor environments. Analyzing everything from lighting, heating, ventilation, furniture selection, and more, Well Living Lab will explore a building’s impact on us. Well Living Lab believes that when we are our healthiest, we perform better in all aspects of life – a tenant Milliken has championed for decades in our work with safety and wellness programs.

By joining this coalition, we hope to contribute to the conversation in a variety of ways:

• Through our work in the floor covering industry, we keenly understand the impact product selections have on our health and well-being. We also dived into the material make-up of our products in order to better understand, and ultimately to make more informed decisions about, our sourcing process for responsible product development.
• Our legacy of safety initiatives, as well as our work regarding associate wellness, positions us as a resource in discovering health and wellness impacts beyond the built environment.
• As dedicated environmental stewards, our company upholds a sustainable mindset in everything we do. From conscientious product development to mindful and deliberate sustainability initiatives, we know that by protecting our planet, we also advance our community in the process.

Channeling our company-wide learning into the Well Living Lab, Milliken will help to shape future lab research for the betterment of our world. Stay tuned for updates as we embark on this exciting partnership.

[1] Source: EPA.com