Two families of waste still difficult to recycle that continue to fill landfills around the world

The recycling of carpets and rugs remains an unresolved point on the product circularity agenda, in fact , if we coldly look at the numbers, represented by the tons of products that are taken to landfills compared to those that are recycled or recovered, we can say that the accounts don't add up.

If we want to talk about tons of waste, according to the European Community, in a year about 1.6 million are sent to landfill or for incineration tons represented by carpets and rugs.

This means a significant share of waste that is not recycled at all due to their complicated composition, made of polymers, wool, calcium carbonate and chemical additives, which together represent a barrier to traditional mechanical recycling.

In fact, the waste recycling systems that represent these two product families are:

- chemical, as illustrated in the article “Carpets can be recycled thanks to molecular technology” ,

- the production of energy through incineration, then the use of flammable waste as a propellant

- reuse

If chemical recycling has no still reached an important diffusion, also due to the costs for the production of new polymers, through the decomposition of the constituent elements of carpets and rugs, the choice of using this waste to produce thermal energy to be used, for example, in cement kilns, seems to be an apparently obligatory choice, given that mechanical recycling is unable to play its part.

But. in reality, in some countries such as England, for some years a third way has been developed which allows the recycling of these complicated waste, through their reuse in the form of new products so that they no longer end up in landfills or incineration.

The carpets and rugs sent for reuse are cleaned, separated and reduced into tiles of different sizes suitable for their reuse as flooring, felt or coupled with other phono- insulators.

The association Carpet Recycling UK (CRUK) was born in England ), which includes some carpet and rug manufacturers, some recyclers and recycling experts, with the aim of improving the circularity of the supply chain.

But even in the United States something is moving, in fact, the state of California has implemented a law on the responsibility of the producer of carpets and, starting in 2026, the state of New York requires manufacturers to establish a program for the collection and recycling of discarded and unused carpets.

In quantitative terms we are talking about still limited numbers, considering that in the textile sector the waste that is generated every year has a very low recycling rate, around 13%, and of these their reuse, for now, sees a low quality reuse, such as rags, padding or insulation.

Furthermore, the circularity expressed by the textile system sees a wide use of recycled polymers that do not derive from its own supply chain, such as for example polyester which derives from recycling of water and soft drink bottles, bottles that are increasingly needed for the production of recycled packaging.

This habit of declaring a textile product circular due to its production with recycled materials, even if they do not come from the textile sector, is a misleading element which does not help to the circularity of the supply chain.

Machine translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.