Whether you're involved in manufacturing, warehousing, sales, or on-site installation, you will use a wide range of resources at work.

Let's take a typical example of a flooring installation, and look at the resources used in the process of laying a tongue and groove solid timber floor onto a concrete subfloor.

Timber strip flooring - materials and energy requirements

The links below will take you to a set of lists that show the breakdown of materials and energy requirements in a typical strip flooring installation.

The basic structure of this type of flooring installation is shown in the drawing at right.

You can see from these lists that we are already getting a very big collection of materials and energy sources, and we haven't even started on the resources involved in manufacturing the products.

On top of that, there are resources used in organising these activities, carrying out business transactions, and transporting the products from one stage to the next.

But staying with our on-site installation, let's trace each of the items needed for this project back to the basic resources that came from the natural environment.

Click on the links below to see the natural resources used in each of four different categories.