Edel Carpets Champions Sustainable Textile Flooring Innovations

Specialised in high quality products with a high level of service, Edel Carpets – with almost a century of carpet manufacturing experience – has in recent years laid a clear focus on the importance of sustainability in luxurious flooring design. In 2025, Managing Director Robbert Wapstra was interviewed to reflect on the company’s contribution to CISUFLO’s research into developing circular flooring and digital product passport technologies on the carpet front.

One of three top producers in all of Europe, the Dutch company Edel Carpets has a particular stake in the UK contract flooring industry as our country is the largest carpet export market from the Netherlands, accounting for around 40% of total carpet exports. The majority of Dutch carpets are produced in Overijssel, the region local to Edel Carpets, where an estimate of 70% gets made.

From the first pilot, CISUFLO set out to produce New Circular Floor Coverings (CFC) prototypes, which could then be sorted via a digital product passport. In addition to ‘CLaminate’, composed of >90% of recycled wood fibres, and ‘CVinyl’, composed of >90% recycled PVC content, the project aimed to produce ‘CTextile’ – a mono-material (PA) or easily separable carpet product. Edel Carpets’ relevant experience proved invaluable to CISUFLO, providing innovative samples that were tested in long-term environments by volunteers from across the project’s reach, which were installed according to local standards. In the UK, FITA was more than happy to conduct testing, as the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2025–2026’s interview with CFA and FITA Training Manager Shaun Wadsworth explores in more detail.

By the sixth and final pilot, which focused on textile flooring recycling, CISUFLO aimed to manufacture the first fully circular carpet. In this respect, Edel Carpets highlights its chief achievement is its ALLOA carpets (ALL Over Again). This product, the company believes, can be totally recycled into new carpet or other high-quality products without diminishing in quality over time. It argues that the 100% recyclable design maximises the value that can be kept in the supply chain and makes it a ‘true circular product’. The ALLOA carpet range comprises two soft and stylish polyester collections: the short, strong Eternity collection and the full, shaggy Nexus collection. These are available from www.edelcarpets.com/en/.

Edel Carpets typically also sells two polyamide carpet collections as part of the Alloa carpet range, also of interest to CISUFLO’s CTextile material research. Specifically, it has manufactured carpets using PA6. Following a change in supplier production, the company shifted to analysing other PA6 yarns to find a suitable replacement that could continue this activity.

This product innovation is the result of a circular loop from yarn to carpet which is at end-of-life sorted, shredded and recycled into granulate which then turns back into yarn to restart the cycle. Not only does Edel Carpets claim this recycled yarn can be used indefinitely to produce recyclable carpets, but the company also reports success in reuse for other high-quality textile products such as swimming costumes. Edel Carpets identifies a need to work with other sectors of the plastics industry, citing that as carpets represent only 3% of all plastics, it must cooperate within the bigger picture.

Through its research into textile flooring recycling research, CISUFLO aimed to develop new installation materials and techniques to ensure easy removal and post-use circularisation. ALLOA carpets can be recycled in just one step, as Edel Carpets reports, representing a significant step in this direction. As the product can only be recycled without glue, using appropriate adhesives and installation practices, as advised in the manufacturer’s guidelines, is necessary for the material value to be recovered within a circular loop.

Robbert sees the manufacturer’s primary responsibility to sustainability as product design and manufacturing methods, concerned foremost with the environmental suitability of raw materials involved. He estimates that the production and purchase and processing of yarn accounts for about 70% of the company’s C0₂ emissions.

In addition, Edel Carpets continues to investigate the ways to limit its water consumption and pollution, while offering good employer practices and governance. Drawing from its experience with QR technologies, Edel Carpets also assisted CISUFLO’s efforts to identify and sort end-of-life carpets with durable labels. The project quickly recognised it was integral that a floorcovering label doesn’t deteriorate at the same rate as the floorcovering itself and remains perfectly readable at end-of-life.

Although the project focused on QR technologies, a long-term option includes the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, which instead uses radio waves to wirelessly track information.

Rugs in particular present a unique challenge because of how a carpet is cut to different shapes and sizes. Identifying tags must be repeated frequently enough to ensure it appears within an end-of-life rug when it comes time to remove and recycle it. Indeed, this requirement also must be considered for lifted carpet scraps. In its own rug manufacturing, Edel Carpets prints QR codes in a linear, repeating fashion typically every 1m.

The overall success of the CISUFLO project was limited by the difficulty of balancing technical advances with commercial viability and industry capacities. To encourage bolder progress in the industry, Robbert argues that more action needs to be taken by governments across Europe to incentivise the supply and demand of sustainable floorcoverings and level the playing field with external competition through tariffs. The next frontier, as supported by industry and government, is, he argues, to deliver flooring that is both sustainable and affordable for a wide audience.

Robbert believes that EPR for packaging should be pursued to fund the recycling schemes necessary for a circular flooring product to not just be possible but fully practised. Better infrastructure and support would expand upon manufacturers’ takeback engagement, which for Edel Carpets is currently predominated by the wholesale market, allowing more retailers and contractors to take advantage of product recyclability. However, Robbert contends that EPR for packaging should be instated based on some type of ‘eco-modulated’ fee; that is, that the more environmentally friendly the product manufactured is, the less burden that manufacturer should have to carry.

Just as collaboration was the keynote of the CISUFLO project and the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2025–2026, Robbert states a willingness to take part in other future projects and is keen to continue building on developed relationships. Edel Carpets’ own future focus was set on continuing to develop upon the technical success of ALLOA and meet ambitious climate targets to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% every 10 years. This progression is measured by manufacturing using recycled raw materials, producing carpets suitable for circular recycling systems, greening energy consumption and using more efficient production methods and machines.

Reflecting on the end of the CISUFLO project, Robbert declared: ‘Sustainability is the key to the future success of not just Edel Carpets but all the flooring industry, and it will only continue to increase in priority. I am convinced that without sustainable products, a company won’t have a product anymore to sell. As much as more progress is necessary, with the CISUFLO project concluded it is important to recognise much has been achieved. We will continue to innovate upon sustainable carpet technologies and support circular flooring with our stakeholders, and I am thankful to all of the parties involved in this project, in particular to the CFA and FITA for their efforts in supporting research in the UK.’

Visit the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2025–2026 to read more about the CISUFLO project.