Laying down a blueprint for increased flooring recycling and recovery

Each year in the UK we remove or replace over 500,000 tonnes (heavier than 11,000 articulated lorries) of carpet, textile and non-textile flooring. Most of this ends up being incinerated or going to landfill, with only small amounts of material recovered through take-back reuse and recycling schemes.

As part of the UK Sustainable Flooring Alliance’s (UKSFA) work in finding solutions for diverting flooring waste from landfill, the independent membership association asked Resource Futures’ Circular Economy experts to scope out the current landscape of take-back schemes for flooring and establish what waste infrastructure exists to recover and recycle these materials in the UK.

Looking at both domestic and commercial flooring, we examined current practices for the collection, management, recycling and disposal of discarded flooring, as well as identifying opportunities and barriers to scaling existing take-back schemes. This included understanding what data and tools were used to report operational performance and outcomes.

Taking a layered approach

We split our research into two phases: a thorough study of the existing research published on flooring take-back schemes and waste management in the UK (including industry reports and government papers), followed by engagement with current take-back scheme operators and operators of waste management infrastructure.

Direct engagement with flooring take-back scheme operators looked at several factors influencing their reach and effectiveness. This included assessing what materials are collected (and in what volumes), how schemes are managed, end destinations for materials, data reporting, and future plans for these schemes.

Waste management companies engaged as part of this research provided useful insight into facilities used for flooring recycling and where they are located across the UK, as well as adding detail on material sorting processes and best practices, new and emerging technologies, collection requirements, recycling capacity and general costs.

Providing the basis for future development

We summarised this research into flooring take-back schemes and the wider sector operations that facilitate them into a comprehensive technical report that lays out four key themes:

• Cross-sectoral engagement: bringing value chain stakeholders together to find approaches that benefit the wider sector as a collective and raise awareness around the options for flooring recovery and recycling.
• Engaging UKSFA members around data-sharing benefits and challenges – exploring common concerns around data anonymity and security and looking at how sector-wide data quality can be improved.
• Developing a UKSFA data action plan to highlight to members how data can be used to provide strategic direction around efforts to divert flooring from landfill and incineration.
• Investigating the potential benefits of introducing extended producer responsibility (EPR) for flooring take-back schemes and reuse/recycling infrastructure in the UK and ensuring there is a fair distribution of responsibility among manufacturers and retailers if such a scheme is implemented.

Building sector consensus

A first set of findings was presented at the UKSFA Conference in June 2025, along with a presentation of findings to UKSFA members following the submission of the full report in October 2025. This was accompanied by a discussion around some of the key gaps in the data, including the compositions of material collections and geographies of waste flooring material flows across the UK. The discussion highlighted a consensus around the need for better access to consistent, granular data across the sector, and a need to further understand the nature and composition of flooring waste throughout the value chain to further inform future efforts of material recovery and recycling.

Driving policy and progress on flooring sustainability

The research enables the UKSFA in its efforts to represent the needs of the flooring industry and offer meaningful, data-driven insight to ongoing sustainability and policy discussions with Defra and other public bodies around key issues such as how a potential EPR scheme for flooring might be designed.

The learnings from this will work will support and inform the UKFSA’s engagement with the industry, allowing it to highlight opportunities and coordinate action on flooring waste reduction. Crucially, it has highlighted stakeholders’ needs to enable coordinated industry action, including that data transparency and standardisation is a requirement to enable future data-driven action to expand and improve the industry’s efforts to recover, reuse and/or recycle flooring waste on a national level.

“Both Max and Ann were really helpful and understanding throughout the project. The number of surveys carried out, the timing of the responses, the feedback from our members, and updates to the report were all handled professionally. Max was very good at presenting the findings of the report at our seminar and also at the working group meeting.”

Adnan Zeb-Khan, Project Manager at UKSFA

 

We work with several organisations across the flooring sector; check out our work with Altro and Polyflor to deliver the UK-wide flooring recovery and recycling scheme Recofloor.