Carpet is the preferred flooring solution in UK housing, nine out of ten households have carpet on their floor. But, what happens to all this carpet when the flat is renewed? The UK produces around 400,000 tonnes of carpet waste each year and because it is a composite product that was never designed for disassembly, there is only a small amount of carpet waste that is being fully recycled in a closed-loop system. Unfortunately, the rest of it is sent to incinerators or deposited in landfills.
Carpet is the preferred flooring solution in UK housing, nine out of ten households have carpet on their floor. But, what happens to all this carpet when the flat is renewed? The UK produces around 400,000 tonnes of carpet waste each year and because it is a composite product that was never designed for disassembly, there is only a small amount of carpet waste that is being fully recycled in a closed-loop system. Unfortunately, the rest of it is sent to incinerators or deposited in landfills.
Historically carpet has been made using wool but in recent years the natural fibre has been replaced with petroleum-based fibre, mainly Nylon and Polypropylene both thermoplastic materials. Through hands-on experimentation and material research into synthetic materials, working as an alchemist with ingenuity and persistence, I have developed a technique that allows me to reshape and repurpose this material for the creation of new design artefacts, avoiding carpet ending up in dumpsites.
My final output is a collection of objects made using carpet waste collected from local shops or found in the streets of London. The aims of this project are to raise environmental awareness and demonstrate how a wasted material can be transformed into something valuable and usable again.
Riccardo Cenedella ©2023
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