Biffa rolls out red carpet for Innovate Recycle
Leaders in sustainable waste management Biffa partners with Northamptonshire firm to create a circular journey for no longer needed carpet.
500,000 tonnes of carpet waste is created in the UK every year – that is roughly the weight of 1000 fully loaded Airbus A380 aeroplanes. Carpet is historically complicated to recycle as most carpet produced in the UK contains blended plastic and wool materials.
Innovate Recycle has developed a circular alternative, deconstructing polypropylene carpet, reclaiming the component parts, and returning them for use in UK manufacturing. This provides a sustainable waste management solution across major industries producing carpet waste including retail and domestic fitters.
Phillip Gammidge, Corporate Account Director at Biffa said:
“We are delighted to be working with entrepreneurs like Joe at Innovate Recycle, sharing our expertise in sustainable waste management and helping them find new solutions to address the recycling challenges the UK faces.”
Biffa recycles over 10 billion items of plastic packaging through our polymers plants every year and we have grown our plastic recycling capacity to 167,000 tonnes as of 2023, collecting a total of 605,000 tonnes of business waste for recycling last financial year.
Roger Wright, Waste Strategy & Packaging Manager said:
“We recognise the public concern around our dependence on plastics and how plastic waste is dealt with. There is absolutely an issue with plastics when they are not designed for reuse or recyclability, and they are not managed with a sustainable waste strategy.
Biffa are pioneers in closed loop plastic recycling, specialising in transforming waste plastic into high-quality materials that are safe for food products. Using recycled plastic when making new products means that less virgin material is used which can have a greater carbon footprint compared with UK recycled plastic.
We need to ensure plastic products are designed appropriately and managed sustainably, so they can be reused or recycled. So, this partnership with Innovate Recycle is great news, as carpet is traditionally extremely difficult to recycle, with very few options for sustainability focused businesses. Biffa’s scale and depth of expertise has the potential to compliment this innovative solution to make a big difference.”
Biffa is a key enabler of the UK circular economy and supports businesses of all sizes to reduce waste and recycle more.
