The challenge
Throwing out excess materials wastes natural resources and costs money. Much industrial waste ends up in landfill sites and can pollute the environment.

Waste from our business includes:

• ‘Window waste' - trimmings from cutting tiles out of rolls of carpet
• Scrapped products from faults or misdirected shipments
• Plastic and cardboard cones (which hold yarn)
• Scrap yarn
• Packaging
• Paper and cardboard from factories and offices.

Our definition of waste also includes everything that is ‘over-engineered' or not essential for a product's function, as well as activities that could be done faster or more efficiently- producing more output with less time and energy.

Our approach
Our goal is to eliminate waste by 2020. We encourage every employee to look for sources of waste across the business and find ways to reduce, reuse or recycle it. This cuts down the waste we send to landfill.

We also want to reduce waste at the end of the product lifecycle when customers dispose of old carpets. To do this, we make each carpet tile with as little material as possible, and use materials that can be easily recycled or reused.

Global progress
Our waste reduction programmes worldwide have helped us achieve:

• 82% reduction in manufacturing waste to landfill (per unit of production) since 1996
• 76% reduction in total volume of manufacturing waste to landfill since 1996
• $438 million in cumulative avoided waste cost since 1995
• 82% reduction in water intake per unit of production since 1996.

Putting our approach into practice in Europe
Employees across our European business are continually finding ways to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill. These include:

• Improving manufacturing efficiency, for example reducing the materials required to make carpet tile and wastage associated with faulty tiles.
• A bonus scheme that rewards employees at our UK factory who achieve a 10% improvement in efficiency or waste reduction each quarter.
• Installing an innovative ultrasonic cutting machine in the Netherlands that reduces ‘window waste' (trimmings left on the sides of carpet rolls and between tiles) by 80%, saving up to 310 tonnes of material a year.
• Our Cool Green machine in the UK, which enables us to recycle waste carpet from the manufacturing process, including off-quality tiles and ‘window waste'.
• Reducing waste through product design, including Random Design to cut installation waste and FlatWorks products that use up to 50% less yarn.
• Providing prepaid courier labels to encourage customers to return product samples for
reuse, and offsetting the greenhouse gas emissions from deliveries and collections.