I was inspired by Polyflor UK who are one of the founding members of Recofloor – the vinyl take-back scheme that started in Europe in 2009. Recofloor collects post-consumer vinyl flooring for recycling into new flooring. This initiative recycled a record amount of 508 tonnes of post-consumer waste vinyl flooring last year alone —enough to cover 23 football fields—and continues to grow from strength to strength.
Used vinyl floors are currently not recycled in South Africa for a simple reason—the glue and screed are attached to the floors after they have been removed and unfortunately there is currently no technology available in South Africa that can separate glue residue from the vinyl to facilitate recycling.
But that did not mean that we had to give up on the idea of a recycling initiative. We decided to think a little out the box. What about recycling off-cuts? This will allow us to develop and refine a recycling initiative, to change industry thinking and allow us to be ready when we can start to recycle used floors. Every piece of off-cut that we can recycle will help to alleviate the strain on the country’s landfills and natural resources.
And so our recycling initiative was born…the first of its kind in South Africa.
STEP 1: Collect your specially branded poly recycling bag from Polyflor SA
STEP 2: Fill the bag with clean vinyl offcuts collected during installation
STEP 3: Polyflor will arrange collection of the bags from the contractors' premises
Do you want to to understand more about the sustainability of vinyl flooring. download our ebook?
We have arranged with the major recyclers of vinyl around the country to collect the material from our premises for recycling use in a wide variety of products, including traffic management products and gum boots.
Join us, let’s RECYCLE, SUSTAIN and PROTECT.
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