Carpet Recycling UK Director Laurance Bird retires

Carpet Recycling UK has announced that their Founder and Director Laurance Bird will retire from his day to day involvement with the not-for-profit membership organisation at the end of 2018.

Laurance has spearheaded CRUK’s activities since the industry body was founded in 2008 to increase the recycling of carpet waste across the UK. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, CRUK has inspired and facilitated the diversion from landfill of one million tonnes of waste carpet to date - equivalent to approximately 400 million m2 of carpet or 57,000 football pitches.

Laurance will continue as a non-executive director of CRUK and will be assisting resource recovery specialist Axion with ISOPREP, a new Horizon2020-funded R&D project to extract pure reusable polypropylene polymer from carpets and other composite materials.

Every year, 400,000 tonnes of carpet is disposed of in the UK. Over the past 10 years, carpet recycling has grown from just 2% of the used volume arising in 2007 to 168,000 tonnes or 42% according to the latest figures for 2017. CRUK’s target is 60% landfill diversion by 2020.

“After ten years of unstinting support from across the carpet industry, I would like to say thank you to all our members, especially the core funders who have played a key role in CRUK’s success,” says Laurance.

CRUK’s core funders are Cormar Carpets, Lifestyle Floors/Headlam, Brintons Carpets, DESSO, ege, Milliken, and Balsan. Leading UK carpet manufacturers backed CRUK with the launch of their voluntary producers’ responsibility scheme to find new uses for waste carpet and divert it from landfill.

Chairman Andy Hall comments: “It is without doubt that the success of CRUK over the last 10 years has in a significant and important way been down to Laurance with his vision, determination, networking and dedication to the challenge of the UK carpet landfill issue.

“We cannot thank him enough and are delighted that he will still be playing a role over the next phase of the organisation’s development.”

Carpet Recycling UK welcomes enquiries from all types of organisations interested in finding new outlets for their waste carpet with potential savings on disposal costs. For more information, please call Marie Rhodes on 0161 440 8325 or email: Marie@carpetrecyclinguk.com  or visit www.carpetrecyclinguk.com.