Recycling Carpet: How’s it done?
Nothing feels quite as homely as setting your bare feet on soft, fuzzy carpet; but what happens to carpets when they’re ready to be changed? Let’s take a look at the process of recycling carpet and how it’s done at McCarthy Marland.
How to Dispose of Carpets
Most modern carpeting is composed of either pure wool, synthetic materials or blends of wool and plastic fibres. Carpet backing is almost always a soft plastic, which replaced jute burlap as a cheap and durable alternative decades ago. You’re still likely to find jute backing on luxury or heavy wool carpeting, but at a much higher cost.
The plastic content of the majority of modern carpets makes them almost immune to decomposition; great for when they’re laid down in your home, but not so great for the environment when they’re sent to landfill.
Even wool and burlap are extremely hardy but as natural materials, they don’t pose as much of an environmental threat as plastics.
Thankfully, old carpet has a thousand uses as a recycled material – in every industry from automotive to entertainment.
Can Carpets be Recycled?
Yes they can – and we’re experts in recycling carpet at our state of the art sorting and recycling facility. The process starts with you at the removal stage.
Remember: when removing carpet for recycling, don’t chop it up or shred it into tiny pieces. This can make recycling too difficult to carry out, as the tiny fibres will be a jumble of natural and synthetic material. Whole carpet is easier to sort and store – plus it’s much less effort for you.
The Carpet Recycling Process
The next step is to sort the carpet, separating all material groups and baling them together. Once we have a considerable amount of carpet bales, we bulk process the plastics (which further reduces our environmental impact by making fewer trips to the processing plant).
At the processing plant, the sorted carpet is then shredded for recycling into new material.
Uses for Recycled Carpet
Recycled carpet can be used as acoustic insulation in cars and buildings, as a crash mat filler, animal bedding, equestrian surfaces – and even new carpets! Carpets can also be processed into plastic pellets for injection moulding to make new plastic products.
How to Dispose of Carpets
Skip hire with McCarthy Marland is one of the best ways to dispose of carpets. We supply skips in a variety of sizes, perfect for any scale of project – including carpet changes throughout your home.
Carpets can be disposed of whole in a skip. We’ll then collect the carpet to sort at our recycling plant – to give your old carpets a new lease of life.
Recycling Carpet with McCarthy Marland
For more information on any of our skip hire services, please contact us today – call 0117 941 2555 or email us at customerservices@mccarthymarland.co.uk