IT ALL BEGINS WITH RUBBER
Rubber is the foundation of our entire business. It has been since 1962 when the Pirelli Group gave birth to Artigo, a division dedicated to the development of rubber flooring. In 1992 the company was acquired by Gruppo Mondo, a leader in rubber surfaces for the commercial and athletic sectors. Gruppo Mondo was able to rapidly develop the rubber flooring market with the use of advanced technologies and the fundamental addition of specific skills and extensive experience.
Rubber is a raw material with few rivals where resilience and basic elasticity are concerned. Using advanced processes that perfect its characteristics we are able to increase its technical performance. The production has always taken place in Italy: from the historical plant south of Milan in the 60s, in 1995 we moved to Cairo Montenotte where production is now concentrated. The plant has grown over the years, adding a modern, high-performance“ mixing room” to the department where the flooring is embossed. We work twenty-four hours a day, for minimum of 5 days a week, to avoid interrupting the process. This schedule best uses the efficiency and quality advantages of our modern vulcanising lines.
The exclusive process, engineered within the group, customized the assembly of various units of machinery. Rubber flooring production follows precise and complex rules. Unlike plastic material, the essential nature of rubber is very delicate. It demands more precision than other resilient flooring materials. While many production stages, like vulcanisation, have undergone major improvements in reduction of waste, they essentially remain those used at inception. These important aspects make us practically unique.
With the Mondo creative technology, we can now fully integrate production of flooring in sheets. Today, the vulcanization lines are simply fed with the mix and 60 m further along the sheets of finished product are automatically packed, reducing the impact of labour and consequently the cost.
We are proud to have succeeded in devising a system that allows us to automatically recover the waste generated during production. This excellent example of respect for the environment, a primary inspiration of our research, is made even more credible synergized with cost reductions, according to the principles of reduce-reuse-recycle.
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