How the UK’s First Carpet Recycling is Changing the Future of Carpets

Innovate Recycle has created the UK’s first means of recycling carpet at volume, opening a new £5m facility in Northampton during 2023.

Despite being a new-start company, Innovate Recycle has already established itself as an award-winning innovative solution to the problem of carpet recycling. The company is playing a key role in the drive towards a circular economy in the carpet industry, as well as the government’s 2050 Net Zero target.

Joseph Eccleston, CEO and Founder, started Innovate Recycle as a waste management operation after growing up in a family business that sold, fitted and removed carpets. Innovate Recycle has grown as a small company to involve a range of entrepreneurial talent. The company won the 2021 Flooring Innovation Award and its Northampton facility – aimed to be the first of several – has been fully operational since Autumn 2023. Eccleston says: “I am proud of the team we have put together and I believe that we can be the answer to the carpet industry’s costly and damaging waste carpet problem”, with Innovate Recycle “leading the way on first steps to building a circular economy approach to carpet waste”.

The brilliance of the idea is that Innovate Recycle finds a way to extend the lifespan of carpet materials after customer use, diverting carpet waste from landfill and other detrimental fates. According to a report commissioned by Carpet Recycling UK, the nation produces between 450,000-500,000 tonnes of textile flooring waste each year. In 2021, 81% was diverted from landfill, largely burnt as fuel for energy production (56%) or incinerated without recovery (6%). While a significant proportion has been recycled for outdoor equine surfaces (14%), this practice was stopped in January 2024 due to concerns of PFOA and PFOS chemicals as well as microplastics spreading into the environment. Innovate Recycle sets out to break from this pattern by growing the volume sent to other reuse and recovery outcomes, using a mechanical manufacturing process that produces 100% recyclable output with zero carbon emissions.

Innovate Recycle’s work has been enabled through funding from private sector investors, crowdfunding, the UK Government’s Getting Building Fund and the South-East Midlands LEP. Circular design requires communication across sectors, which Innovate Recycle practises by working closely with customer-focused carpet manufacturers and retailers, local authorities and national government.

Since December 2023, Innovate Recycle has been working with UBH Group, a company that segregates the polypropylene-tufted and action-backed material required for Innovate Recycle’s Northampton process line and finds alternative outlets for the other forms of carpet. UBH Group finds end-of-life recycling solutions for general, hazardous and technological waste, as well as offers recycling consultancy services; some of their main material intake includes carpets, solar panels and mattresses. This partnership ensures that different types of carpets can be responsibly recycled with maximum efficiency.

The Northampton site is close to two key cities, Birmingham and London, that account for the majority of Innovate Recycle’s carpet intake. Aiming to open more facilities in the future, Innovate Recycle will be better positioned to take in more local carpet waste across the UK. This plan will not only increase processing capacities but will also further minimise transportation carbon emissions and create more green jobs.

The company is ambitious with its plans for growth, capitalising on the momentum behind environmental initiatives. Eccleston is conscious that “There is still much to do for all of us to rethink our mindset to achieve the levels of individual and collective action necessary”. Indeed, there is more than enough carpet waste to allow Innovate Recycle to grow; the company is looking for new sites across the UK, where it will be able to open multi-line facilities for this purpose. In the longer-term, there are also opportunities to expand into other material recycling: nylon carpet, astro turf, synthetic textiles, and fishnets are just some of the possibilities.

There are still issues within the carpet industry which need to be addressed. There is no existing trademark to show whether a carpet is recyclable, meaning that Innovate Recycle must spend more effort to manually inspect the quality of their carpet intake. In addition, so far there is no EPR scheme for carpets in the UK which, if introduced, would further encourage carpet design to be reusable and fully recyclable. 

Nonetheless, the work of the first carpet recycling facility in the UK is an example of a sustainability initiative that is leading the way for the future of the carpet industry. Innovate Recycle gives new life to post-consumer carpet waste and opens up possibilities for sustainable collaboration across the carpet sector. More than this, it demonstrates that there is a growing market readily available for circular manufacturing for those with the ambition and motivation to achieve it.

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