What 'Going Green' Means to Us: 'Rubbish! Let's Cut it Out'
Contract Flooring Journal
February 1, 2007
What 'going green' means to us: 'rubbish! Let's cut it out';
Point of view
SECTION: Pg. 8(2) ISSN: 0969-0352
LENGTH: 636 words
Pete Thomas, environment manager, Tarkett Marley Floors and chairman of the UK Resilient Flooring Association (UKRFA) recycling committee, writes:
Tarkett Marley Floors
I AM sure all of us would agree that since the introduction of PVC in the 1930s there has been little to equal the versatility, safety and practicality that it offers modern life.
From its use in the chemical, healthcare, construction and fashion industry and as the vinyl flooring we all know in hospitals, schools, kitchens and bathrooms up and down the land, it is the visible and invisible fabric of everyday life.
In terms of cost-benefits it has few equals and is high on the list of many businesses as a desired material, but it is also high on the hit-list of many environmental campaigners.
Industrial, commercial and household waste in England and Wales amounts to over 100m tonnes annually.
Current oil reserves are predicted to run out in as little as the next 20 years. It therefore comes as no surprise that the issue of waste minimisation, recycling and working with sustainable sources is high on everyone's agenda.
It is no longer enough to look just at our financial and capital commitments. We all need to be able to demonstrate our 'green credentials' by contributing to a cleaner environment.
So the issue we face as flooring manufacturers is finding ways of providing our customers with the vinyl they desire, offering a modern, safe, hygienic and hardwearing flooring solution but also one that fits in with their own corporate social responsibility agenda.
At Tarkett Marley Floors the waste in the flooring industry has always been an issue for us.
Instead of uselessly and expensively burying flooring waste in the ground we have been running recycling facilities since the 1960s, turning this very recyclable material back into new products.
This summer we conducted major work on our production units to increase the quality of the recycled component in our flooring.
Currently 25% of the products used in our safety flooring are recycled and 50% of the construction of Safetred is made from recycled material, much to the delight of our customers.
However, in order for recycling to work effectively we need to be able to source the used flooring for recycling.
We believe that the key to successful recycling is to make it easy for people to contribute their bit.
Providing green bins for garden waste to be made into compost and putting bottle banks in supermarket car parks has encouraged many people to recycle. In the flooring industry we need to provide similar solutions for flooring contractors, to make recycling vinyl flooring waste simple.
Following this approach, this year we launched a pioneering recycling scheme for vinyl flooring in partnership with Recovinyl.
The scheme encourages greater collection of post-installation flexible PVC flooring.
For large contracts we supply cages to store the off-cuts. Whilst we are not the only company to provide the collection service, we now take this one stage further and recycle the waste flooring.
Following collection, the material is taken to our Recovinyl-accredited PVC recycling plant in Clervaux, Luxembourg where it is reprocessed and re-used to produce a calendered backing for either new vinyl flooring or contract-grade PVC backed carpet.
If this scheme, which we believe is the first of its type in the UK, proves to be successful we plan to roll it out nationwide to all installers of Tarkett Marley Floors products.
This initiative is a classic market-lead example of 'closed-loop' recycling and our aim is to divert tonnes of valuable and recyclable material flora landfill. But we are not sitting on our laurels.
There is still more that the PVC industry can and will do. Working as part of Vinyl 2010 we will continue to innovate in the area of recycling and sustainability.
LOAD-DATE: February 24, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
ACC-NO: 159696158
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Magazine
JOURNAL-CODE: 0NJZ ASAP
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