Carpet is the preferred flooring solution in UK housing, nine out of ten households have carpet on their floor. But,... Read More
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.