#HTE

Lego-like Tile System Lets You Easily Click the Tiles Into Place

If you paint a room in a color you grow not to like, it’s easy enough to redo it. Not so with tile, which is messy (and wasteful) to remove and replace.

A Danish company called Click'n Tile has designed a tile system for the flighty, and they’ve apparently taken a design cue from a certain nearby toy company. The Click'n Tile system involves this flexible back plate, which you can cut with scissors:

You’re meant to mortar this back plate to your wall:

Then, as you might’ve guessed, you can click their Lego-like tiles onto it:

In addition to letting you easily create your own patterns by buying the colors a la carte, I guess the idea is that you can spontaneously add stripes of color or change the patterns completely…

…but isn’t that wasteful? On the company’s Sustainability page, they write:

REDUCE

- The tiles require less energy to produce compared to conventional tiles, with conventional tiles having to be burned in the kiln at temperatures up to 1300 degrees.

- Click'n Tiles tiles are between 4-10 times lighter than conventional tiles and omit less CO2 emissions during transport.

REUSE

- The tiles can be used again and again and again and again …

RECYCLE

- On the back of the tile you’ll see the recycle sign, which means that you can easily see what type of plastic it is made of. This way, we can properly reuse the tile without further impact on the environment.

- The mounting plate is made of the same type of plastic material as the tile – This means that we can produce new mounting plates of excess tiles and avoid waste.

- Discarded tiles are crushed and used for granules.

They also state that returning the tiles to the company gets you credit towards new tiles.

My question is, does the lack of grout mean that residue from cooking vapors and the like lead to gunk in the crevices? Would these get mildewy in a bathroom? I get that you can pop the tiles off to wash them, but I don’t know how often I’d want to do that.