Page 48 - CFJ_Feb26

SUSTAINABILITY FOCUS
Taken from the CFA Sustainability Guide 2025
Contractors’ view

Jonathan Wells, Contracts Manager at Leicester-based J&S Flooring, believes that, for all the talk about sustainability,
there is still a very long way to go before the contract flooring industry can say it has really got to grips with this issue
and is making a meaningful contribution to national sustainability goals.

Jonathan quotes the example of a recent ‘This would be a fantastic thing,’ says mention large quantities of old adhesive
project his company was involved in. Jonathan Wells. ‘Schemes such as buckets.’
This was a large university library where Recofloor are great, but they are still ‘Can manufacturers’ schemes be
4,500sqm of carpet tiles were to be too small. We need to find a way of extended? At the moment everything
replaced. adopting the principles behind Recofloor is very disjointed, which is holding us
J&S advised that a particular carpet on a truly industry-wide basis. Regarding back. There has to be a workable and
tile from a major British manufacturer adhesives, at the moment even the realistic way of bringing all this together,
should be used, who undertook to take largest distributors might only operate across different sectors – manufacturing,
back all the uplifted flooring into their bins from a single adhesive manufacturer. distributing and contracting.
own recycling scheme, which would have It’s the same with the latex smoothing ‘In the meantime I always tell my fitters
avoided this large amount of carpet tiles compounds. to use the recycling bins, if available,
going into landfill. ‘A greater focus on plastics recycling but this needs to become more part of
The client however chose a tile of a would be very positive, such as for the industry culture, part of the training
slightly different colour from another example a collaboration between programmes that new entrants to our
manufacturer, who did not operate such a manufacturers who use the same type industry go through.’
scheme, resulting in all the uplifted carpet of plastics from adhesive containers to At the end of the day, as well as being
tiles going to landfill. smoothing compound liquid containers. the moral thing to do, improvement on
‘This pattern is still repeated up and down This would enable the recycling of sustainability is also a sales technique.
the country many times unfortunately,’ says containers from any of the main The issue is set to stay top of the agenda,
Jonathan Wells. ‘The amount of carpet tiles manufacturers in one mixed recycle and contractors who can show that they
still going into landfill is shocking frankly, bin. Contractors throw away thousands are being proactive will be the ones who
and quite surprising, given the amount of
time we have been talking about recycling of smoothing compound 5 litre liquid will be most successful in the battle for
in this industry.’ containers per year, for instance, not to the sales of the future. 
This does show that education is
required at all levels from the flooring
contractors through to the clients
themselves.
‘Ultimately it’s down to the client of
course, when it comes to specifying
a product,’ says Jonathan Wells. ‘We
understand that they will require a
particular look, but they sometimes need
to be more aware of the implications of
their decisions.’
J&S Flooring was founded in 1976, so
has seen the development of interest in
recycling and sustainability right from the
start. Jonathan Wells believes contractors
are quite limited in what they can do.
They normally do not have the space to
store large quantities of uplifted flooring
products or adhesive containers. They
also often don’t have the budget or the
time to deal with this waste.
But what he thinks would make a
difference would be if manufacturers step
up and work together more closely on
two fronts. Firstly they need to accelerate
the adoption of recycled materials into
their products and secondly they need to
pool their resources and efforts into more
effective recycling schemes, enabling
companies to recycle uplifted products
made by manufacturers other than
themselves. To view the guide go to: www.cfjnews.uk/issues/cfasustainability2025

48 CFJ February 2026 www.contractflooringjournal.co.uk
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