Anthony Francis, Managing Director of Mayfield Floors, is proud of his company’s leading role on sustainability, notably its support for Recofloor. “We have been involved with Recofloor since it started,” he says, “and we were one of the first companies to do so, since we saw its advantages. We have championed it since then and I was personally delighted to be recognised with an award in their ten year awards presentations.
We do view ourselves as a leading light in terms of the Recofloor scheme. That’s because we view waste and offcuts as our biggest issue when it comes to sustainability. “One of the main misconceptions with the whole recycling agenda is that it costs more. That has not been our experience. Even in the early days of it, it saved us a lot of money. In fact our main motivation for working more sustainably was cost-saving. As the cost of skips and sending waste to landfill has gone up, this has only become increasingly true. Sending waste to landfill has become increasingly costly. Using Recofloor is in reality a lot cheaper.”
Five years ago Mayfield also got involved with CRUK who put them in touch with Tarkett and their ReStart scheme, who now do all the recycling of their carpet tiles. “We do a lot of office fit-out so there are a lot carpet tiles. Our growth with the scheme has been consistent, sometimes doubling within a year. So our involvement helps the planet and it is also a cost saving to us. This is the message we need to get over – it is perceived to be expensive, but actually it saves you money.” The company has also partnered with F Ball on their collection scheme, which has mainly operated through distributers up to this point, but they are now starting to work with contractors as well.
“I know it’s not always easy to carry out full recycling – one of the issues is that some flooring contractors don’t have the space to do it. You need room for bins, sacks and palletised carpet tiles. You also need someone to manage it, to oversee the segregation of materials. A lot of flooring contractors are really small businesses, so there are challenges for them to do this.”
According to Anthony Francis, although there are separate waste streams for aluminium, plasterboard and some other products, you rarely see one for flooring.
“It’s almost like flooring is the forgotten part of the whole sustainability story, and one of our challenges as a trade is how do we get that changed. How do we get the flooring included in the mindset of the main contractors when it comes to recycling.”
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