Sustainability – We Can All Play Our Part

Finally, here we are near the end of the first decade of the 21st century and flooring manufacturers among others are getting their act together over the burning issue of sustainability - and not before time.

Much more thought is now given to the fact that plentiful though some of the earths resources may still be, they are still finite.  Although naturally occurring, they cannot replenish themselves at the same rate as mankind’s ability to use them up, and so to quote a much used phrase “something has to be done” - but what?

At Altro, we have invested a great deal of money in developing the world’s first recycling plant capable of breaking down safety flooring into it’s component parts.  Previously it was thought impossible to be able to recycle safety flooring due to the abrasive nature of the aggregates the product contains which give safety flooring its signature slip resistance and durability. But we did it, and thanks to this innovation we have not sent any waste PVC to landfill since mid 2007 and now recycle 100% of our factory waste PVC along with some installation waste.  Obviously this is a big step forward for the flooring industry and we hope other responsible manufacturers of pvc flooring will follow our lead.

But that’s only part of the story, what more can be done? And what can you do as flooring contractors to help sustain the earths dwindling resources? The answer is, quite a lot.

I remember four decades ago a contractor in Manchester who is still trading and very successfully to this day, instructing his fitters to return all decent size off-cuts of vinyl sheet to his warehouse.  They were then cut into tile size pieces, sorted out by colour and thickness and reused for small back of house areas, making great use not to mention profit from something that otherwise would have ended up in a hole in the ground.

Could it be that the recycling phenomenon that is sweeping the nation not to mention the world actually began in my home town?  Probably not, I’m sure that many of you will remember similar thrifty episodes from the dim and distant past in whichever part of the UK you hail from.

I do remember one manager at a company I once worked at, insisting that two cups of tea should be made from each teabag and if only one cup was made, the bag should be dried out and stored until needed.  Now I’m all for sustainability but that’s going a bit too far don’t you think?  He’s dead now poor fellow, got hit by a Tetley wagon on his way to the supermarket for a packet of teabags.  At least he saved the money he would have spent if he’d actually got there which I’m sure would have made him very happy, if you know what I mean.

Joking aside, there is a lot that can be done by all of us in a low key practical way.  For instance, recycling paper/cardboard wrappers and boxes from rolls of vinyl and boxes of tiles, on large sites main contractors could provide a skip specifically for this purpose.  Likewise plastic adhesive buckets could be returned/collected and washed then refilled. Tens of millions of square metres of contemporary flooring is installed each year in the UK, imagine how many adhesive containers are thrown away each year, the amount must be staggering.

Again because I’ve been around forever, I recall a time when Altro in an early attempt at recycling, put adhesives in a plastic bag then inside a bucket to provide stability.  The idea being that for a small remuneration, contractors would return empty and relatively clean buckets to us to be refilled.  What actually happened was that the financial reward obviously wasn’t big enough and most containers ended up as screeding buckets, which I suppose is another kind of recycling so perhaps the incentive did work, though not as we anticipated.

We are currently looking at ways to recover waste from site following completion of the installation, not to cut up into tile size pieces but to recycle and reuse.  The practicalities are obviously tricky but with literally millions of tons of potential free raw material out there, a solution will definitely be found.  The challenge for manufacturers is not only to collect and recycle the waste from the recent installation, but also the flooring which has just been ripped up to make way for the new product.

Personally when the recycling of contemporary flooring really takes off; I see waste pvc/rubber/linoleum/carpet collection on a grand and meaningful scale as being a completely separate enterprise to the production of the flooring.  Fleets of vehicles will be needed to collect materials from sites around the country.  Alternatively waste material could be “weighed in” like scrap metal at central collection depots in all major cities.  This would provide a big incentive for hard working contractors to recycle waste material.  Once broken down into the many constituent parts the produce could be sold back to the flooring manufacturers to be used in new products reducing the need for a continuous supply of new raw material - what do you think?

So all of us have our part to play in this unfolding story of sustainability, go on play yours, you never know it may just help to save the world.

This article first appeared in the July 2009 edition on the CFJ.