Carpet waste

Carpet Matter

The UK produces around 400,000 tonnes of waste carpet a year and only 10% is recycled properly. The rest is sent to the incinerator for energy production or ends up in landfills.

Since most of the carpets are made from petroleum-based synthetic fibres, depositing the carpets directly into the environment is going to prove extremely harmful. The most common components of carpets are nylon and polypropylene, however, is very difficult to sort different components out and this makes it complicated to recycle waste carpets.

The Carpet Matter project aims to raise awareness about this waste stream, by crafting new usable objects from unwanted carpet broadloom. By processing carpets as common plastic material, Designer Riccardo Cenedella is aiming to build a hot compression mould, exploiting the property of the thermoplastic material to change shape when it is heated. As a modern bricoleur, he believes that we should make with what we have to hand.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.