Innovate Recycle has created the UK’s first means of recycling carpet at volume,
opening a new £5m facility in Northampton during 2023.
Despite being a new-start company, Innovate Recycle has already established itself as an award-winning innovative solution to the problem of carpet recycling. The company is playing a key role in the drive towards a circular economy in the carpet industry, as well as the government’s 2050 Net Zero target. Joseph Eccleston, CEO and Founder, started Innovate Recycle as a waste management operation after growing up in a family business that sold, fitted and removed carpets. Innovate Recycle has grown as a small company to involve a range of entrepreneurial talent.
The company won the 2021 Flooring Innovation Award and its Northampton facility – aimed to be the first of several – has been fully operational since Autumn 2023. Eccleston says: “I am proud of the team we have put together and I believe that we can be the answer to the carpet
industry’s costly and damaging waste carpet problem”, with Innovate Recycle “leading the way on first steps to building a circular economy approach to carpet waste”.
The brilliance of the idea is that Innovate Recycle finds a way to extend the lifespan of carpet materials after customer use, diverting carpet waste from landfill and other detrimental fates. According to a report commissioned by Carpet Recycling UK, the nation produces between 450,000-500,000 tonnes of textile flooring waste each year.
In 2021, 81% was diverted from landfill, largely burnt as fuel for energy production (56%) or incinerated without recovery (6%). While a significant proportion has been recycled for outdoor equine surfaces (14%), this practice was stopped in January 2024 due to concerns of PFOA and PFOS chemicals as well as microplastics spreading into the environment. Innovate Recycle sets out to break from this pattern by growing the volume sent to other reuse and recovery outcomes, using a mechanical manufacturing process that produces 100% recyclable output with zero carbon emissions.
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