J&S Flooring Discusses Long Way to Go to Achieve Meaningful Sustainability

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 project his company was involved in. This was a large university library where 4,500sqm of carpet tiles were to be replaced. J&S advised that a particular carpet tile from a major British manufacturer should be used, who undertook to take back all the uplifted flooring into their own recycling scheme, which would have avoided this large amount of carpet tiles going into landfill.

The client however chose a tile of a slightly different colour from another manufacturer, who did not operate such a scheme, resulting in all the uplifted carpet tiles going to landfill.

“This pattern is still repeated up and down the country many times unfortunately,” says Jonathan Wells. “The amount of carpet tiles still going into landfill is shocking frankly, and quite surprising, given the amount of time we have been talking about recycling in this industry.”

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.

“This would be a fantastic thing,” says Jonathan Wells. “Schemes such as Recofloor are great, but they are still too small. We need to find a way of adopting the principles behind Recofloor on a truly industry-wide basis. Regarding adhesives, at the moment even the largest distributors might only operate bins from a single adhesive manufacturer. It’s the same with the latex smoothing compounds.

“A greater focus on plastics recycling would be very positive, such as for example a collaboration between manufacturers who use the same type of plastics from adhesive containers to smoothing compound liquid containers. This would enable the recycling of containers from any of the main manufacturers in one mixed recycle bin. Contractors throw away thousands of smoothing compound 5 litre liquid containers per year, for instance, not to mention large quantities of old adhesive buckets.”

“Can manufacturers’ schemes be extended? At the moment everything is very disjointed, which is holding us back. There has to be a workable and realistic way of bringing all this together, across different sectors – manufacturing, distributing and contracting.

“In the meantime I always tell my fitters to use the recycling bins, if available, but this needs to become more part of the industry culture, part of the training programmes that new entrants to our industry go through.”

At the end of the day, as well as being the moral thing to do, improvement on sustainability is also a sales technique. The issue is set to stay top of the agenda, and contractors who can show that they are being proactive will be the ones who will be most successful in the battle for the sales of the future.

Read the CFA Guide to Sustainability 2025–2026 for more sustainability advice.

www.jsflooring.co.uk