It’s encouraging to see that eco-friendly flooring products are growing in popularity – but true sustainability in flooring is about much more than product choice. The bigger picture includes considerations of resource conservation and waste reduction – issues which are best tackled using circular economy principles.
Unlike the traditional linear “take-makeuse-dispose” model, circular economy principles emphasise minimising waste and maximising resource efficiency. This means designing products and processes in such a way that materials can be repurposed, re-used or recycled at the end of their lifecycle, so ‘closing the loop’ of resource consumption and waste generation.
In the flooring sector, PVC is used to make various types of vinyl flooring for the commercial and residential sectors and is a leading choice for education, healthcare, hospitality, and public buildings. When PVC reaches its end-of-life it can be recycled up to seven times without any loss of performance. With vinyl, we typically need to deal with both waste from uplifted end-of-life flooring and installation waste in the form of offcuts. And despite industry efforts to minimise offcut waste, it can be tricky, given the need to accommodate irregular room shapes, complex
layouts, and design preferences. However, with Recofloor, there is a viable opportunity to
keep the materials from both uplifted vinyl and installation offcuts in circulation.
Recofloor: Leading vinyl flooring recycling
Established in 2009 by UK flooring manufacturers Altro and Polyflor, Recofloor provides an easy-to-use service for the collection and recycling of waste vinyl flooring.
Their UK-wide take-back collection scheme has become a driving force within the industry. By participating in the scheme, construction companies, building contractors, and flooring specialists can support PVC recovery and so reduce the demand for new raw materials in manufacturing. The material collected is recycled back into new flooring or sent to a UK traffic management product manufacturer.
The benefits of Recofloor’s recycling initiative extend well beyond the conservation of resources. Importantly, the scheme diverts waste vinyl flooring from landfill or incineration. This enables participants to avoid the environmental harm that would otherwise be caused by what is a non-biodegradable material.
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