Sustainability

Landfill tax has now risen by 250% over the past few years and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. With improvements in technology and an increase in carpet recycling plants throughout the UK, it now costs less to recycle all types of carpet and underlay waste than it does to send to landfill.  Carpet Recycling UK have a database of carpet and tile recyclers on their website: www.carpetrecyclinguk.com

Each year in the U.S. 4 billion pounds of carpet is discarded in landfills - the waste nylon carpet can be added to other waste nylon products such as fishing nets.  The process involves shredding, melting and finally spinning into new nylon fibres (such as the brand Econyl®) which has many applications in the fashion industry and can also be spun into yarn suitable for making new carpets.  Alternatively nylon from waste carpets can be extruded and injection moulded into engineering plastics such as washing machine parts or wheel trims.  This also applies to carpets with a polypropylene face fibre and/or polypropylene backing.

PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) can be used in all sorts of products across the flooring industry.  As well as forming the whole of or a percentage of the product, it can now also be used as the main pile content.  Carpet pile made from 100% PET can be recycled, is mould and mildew proof, water repellent and stain resistant.

Carpet tiles with a durable nylon pile can often be re-furbished and re-used. There are a growing number of carpet tile re-use and re-sale schemes, often run by community organisations who provide low-cost flooring to households and charities.  Where carpet tiles aren’t suitable for re-use, they can be recycled by separating the nylon fibres from the bitumen backing. The fibres are then recycled into yarn for new carpet, and the bitumen into applications such as roofing and road surfaces.

There are carpet backing products that use 100% recycled PET post-consumer plastic to make its carpet backing - just one square metre prevents at least eight plastic bottles from going to landfill or polluting the oceans.

Along with carpet backing, recycled plastics are also used to make some carpet underlays, aside from the eco-friendly credentials there are virtually no VOCs compared to alternative PU foam underlays and are made up 98% recycled materials, usually from foam reclaimed from soft furnishings.

There's also underlay types that use 100% recycled materials; recycled wool felt topping, mixed material middle layer and a rubber crumb bottom layer made from old car tyres.  

There will always be some carpet waste that can’t be recycled, either because it is too difficult to separate out the different materials or because the carpet is too contaminated by what’s been spilt on it during its lifetime. As carpet has a high calorific value, however, this unrecyclable carpet waste can be put to use to produce energy from waste (EFW) – for example, as a fuel replacement for cement kilns.