Walk away the dirt 

It all began just over 70 years ago when an innovative caretaker at a bank was tired of seeing the dirt that customers tracked into the building from the streets. He took a few sticks of wood and some strips of rubber and nailed them together to make the first prototype of a new entrance solution: the Kåbe entrance mat.

The solution is simple and smart: dust and dirt that is removed from the shoes falls down between the mat’s rubber strips preventing it going into entrance halls. Trelleborg supplies 550,000 meters of rubber to the mat maker’s manufacturing facility each year.

“Our cooperation with Trelleborg works very well,” says Anders Åberg, Kåbe-Mattan’s CEO. “We have a long history of cooperation. They know our needs and always deliver on time. An alert partner is very important for a small company like us that cannot keep large amounts of stock.”

Nowadays, many of the entrance solutions are made from aluminum, adapted to customers’ different needs and wishes. The matting can be corrugated for entrances that see heavy traffic, color-matched to the interior environment and gentle on high heels.

The primary purpose of an entrance mat is to remove dirt from the shoes that pass over it. The entrance mat is therefore often provided with different zones: a scraper grid zone, corrugated rubber strips and a textile zone. This system has been shown to protect floors exceptionally well. “Our customer has successfully refined our rubber profile and managed to create a sustainable premium product that fulfills a practical need,” says Jacob Möllvik, Sales Manager within Trelleborg Industrial Solutions.

The company that manufactures the mats has annual revenue of about USD 4.5 million and exports to the whole world. The product consists of 100 percent recyclable material and meets the highest demands of chemical content. To comply with requirements in public environments, it must also meet a range of fire resistance standards.