The flooring industry is not bound by law to recycle waste, but Polyflor is actively seeking to recover and recycle its post-consumer waste vinyl flooring to minimise the flooring industry’s environmental impact and close the loop of their products’ life cycles.

Polyflor is a cofounding and funding member of Recofloor, the industry’s leading vinyl take-back scheme for recycling end of life post-consumer vinyl flooring. Through Recofloor, Polyflor can recycle smooth and safety installation off-cuts, smooth uplifted flooring and old stock roll-end and samples which would normally end up in landfill. This material is recovered and recycled into new flooring or other useful products such as traffic cones.

Increasing volumes of quality reclaimed vinyl waste for recycling is continuously improving (a challenge has been educating members about the importance of the material they send back through the Recofloor scheme and avoiding contamination, which is not always easy on a busy building site). Volumes are consistently strong, with 3,771 tonnes having been collected since the scheme started in 2009. This volume equals nearly 1,257,000m² or 31,425 x 20m rolls — enough vinyl waste flooring to cover 173 football pitches — and is a saving of over 3,017 tonnes of CO2.