Laminate Flooring: From Perstorp to ABB Robots

Laminate flooring is one of the most common floors in new and renovated homes, yet few people wonder how a plank of printed paper, resin and fibreboard gets made. This post follows laminate flooring manufacturing from hand-laid wooden floors to a Swedish invention of 1977, and then through the high density fibreboard lines and click joints that turned it into a mass product. It looks at what plants do today, including fresh news on recycling old floors, and at where ABB robots fit in: stacking boards, handling packs and palletizing finished flooring at the end of the line.

Two men clicking laminate planks together over an underlay. Photo: Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How wooden floors became a factory product

For centuries a good floor meant solid wood laid by hand. Joiners cut boards and fitted them with tongues and grooves, and in grand houses they set out patterned parquet piece by piece, as in the marquetry floors of the Château de Seneffe in Belgium. Every step needed skilled hands, from sawing and planing to sanding and finishing on site. Engineered boards began to change that. William H. Mason developed hardboard, later sold as Masonite, in the 1920s, and decorative plastic laminates such as Formica were on tables and counters long before anyone walked on them.

A hand-laid marquetry parquet floor at the Château de Seneffe in Belgium. Photo: Bandinelli via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The move to the floor came from Sweden. The chemical company Perstorp, which had made floor surfaces since 1923, invented laminate flooring in 1977 and sold it under the Pergo name. It reached European shops in 1984 and the United States in 1994. A laminate plank is a sandwich: a wear layer, a printed decor paper soaked in melamine resin, a fibreboard core and a backing layer, all pressed together under heat. Because the core is a uniform board, a factory can cut it into identical planks over and over.

The industrial park in Perstorp, Sweden, home of the company that invented laminate flooring in 1977. Photo: Johan Wessman / News Oresund via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Large scale production of medium density fibreboard began in the 1980s in Europe and North America, and laminate makers moved to the denser HDF for their cores. Presses turned wood fibres and resin into big boards, which were laminated, cut into planks and profiled along their edges. Then came the glueless joint. Välinge Aluminium in Sweden brought out a locking system in 1996, sold as Alloc and Fiboloc, and the Belgian company Unilin released its own in 1997 for Quick-Step floors. Most click flooring today is made under licence from one of the two, or from both.

Old board pressing machinery in the former Tafisa panel factory in Pontevedra, Spain. Photo: galiciandreamer via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Laminate lines, recycling and robots today

A modern line runs from fibre to pallet. Boards leave the press, go through lamination and are sawn into planks, which pass through profiling machines that cut the click edges. After inspection the planks are counted into packs, shrink wrapped or boxed, and stacked on pallets. Several of these steps are heavy and repetitive, and the printed surface scratches easily, so handling has to be gentle. ABB's wood industries brochure lists flooring among the products its robots already handle and pack, along with wood panels, doors and window frames.

An ABB robot with a vacuum gripper lifting a thin wooden board, from ABB's wood industries brochure. Photo: ABB

This month's news concerns the other end of a floor's life. On 9 October 2026 InteriorDaily reported that Unilin turns old laminate flooring back into raw material, with the company saying it had finally cracked the code. Its patented process, often called Osiris, uses steam pressure to pull wood fibres apart from the resin in HDF, so the fibres can go into new boards. Woodworking Network reported that a pilot plant in France has been running since 2021, and Unilin has said it wants recycled material to make up at least 25 percent of its raw material mix in future.

A broken piece of fibreboard showing the pressed wood fibres in its core. Photo: Andrey Pertsev via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

At the end of the line, ABB robots can take jobs they already do in similar industries. The IRB 460 and IRB 660 are four axis palletizers built for fast end of line stacking, and the brochure describes a palletizer with a 3.15 m reach and a 250 kg payload. Six axis arms such as the IRB 6700 can lift whole stacks of boards with vacuum or clamp grippers. At Svedplan, a Swedish maker of flat pack furniture, nine ABB robots took over depalletizing (four of them) and packing (five), and production rose by 45 percent. Our woodworking robot post covers sanding and finishing.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Where laminate flooring automation goes next

In factories, the next step is mostly about flexibility. Plants run many decors and plank sizes in short batches, so robot cells have to switch grippers and stacking patterns quickly. Palletizing patterns are usually built and tested offline in RobotStudio, and cameras can check packs before they are wrapped. If recycling grows, robots could possibly help sort returned floors and strip off underlay and trim before the boards go into the steam process. It is dirty work that nobody is keen to do by hand.

An ABB robot's vacuum gripper picking up a thin coated panel. Photo: ABB

At home, laminate remains one of the easiest floors to lay yourself, which was the reason for inventing the click joint. Robots that install floors are still research projects and prototypes, mostly aimed at tiles on large building sites, as we described in our post on tile laying robots. Homeowners are more likely to notice changes in the product itself, such as planks with better water resistance and floors that the maker can take back and recycle.

Laying a laminate floor at home, one plank at a time. Photo: Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The open problems are familiar from other wood industries. Fibre dust gets everywhere in a board plant, so robots and grippers need protection and regular cleaning. Decor surfaces and click edges chip easily, which puts the weight on gripper design and smooth motion. A palletizing cell also has to pay for itself while laminate competes with vinyl plank floors, and many smaller plants have no engineers who can program and maintain robots. Heavy stacks moving at speed call for fences, scanners or safety software such as SafeMove.

An ABB robot stacking wooden panels on a roller conveyor. Photo: ABB

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