Recycling

We recycle at each step :

Production waste

Industrial trials, quality scraps, offcuts in the production process : all generate production waste.
Gerflor factories are genuine recycling centres: the waste is collected on the production lines, crushed and reincorporated into new products.

We aim towards “Zero Waste” factories.

Installation waste

Each job site generates between 4 to 10% of installation offcuts, depending the type of flooring or wall solution.

Our vinyl floors and wall coverings are 100% recyclable. The challenge is to collect the waste, given the geographical spread of our customers

End of life products

After long years of use, ‘clean’ flooring (not glued and without raw materials concerned by any REACH restriction) can be collected through the Gerflor Second
Life programme.

The other flooring products (glued, mixed with other materials or with raw materials concerned by any REACH restriction) have a collection and recycling route of their very own.

A unique recycling partnership with PAPREC

Since 2017, we have partnered in a joint company with the French recycling leader PAPREC to create a recycling factory located in France. Called ‘Floor to Floor’, this recycling facility is specialised in resilient flooring. It processes Reach-compliant laying offcuts and nonglued end-of-life products. It sorts and transforms waste collected through the Second Life program into granulates which are then sent to Gerflor factories to produce new flooring.
Gerflor commits to intensifying its investments in the recycling sector . A key initiative is the creation in 2025 of a new Gerflor/Paprec recycling factory which multiplies by five our Floor to Floor recycling capacity. This is key as local regulations are becoming more restrictive.

Linoleum recycling

Linoleum is also fully recyclable.

In our DLW factory in Germany, production waste is recycled into new product.

We collect installation waste through our Second Life program. This waste is crushed in our linoleum factory and reintegrated into new products

Eucertplast certified recycling programmes

The entire Gerflor recycling program has been certified by Eucertplast since 2014. Eucertplast is the European reference in term of recycling schemes third part certification.

Collaborative initiatives

Gerflor is an active member of ERFMI, the European Institute of Resilient Flooring Manufacturers. ERFMI has launched several research projects to develop solutions for recycling bonded floors that do not comply with REACH:

• CIRCULAR FLOORING : Supported by the European Union, the CIRCULAR FLOORING project aims to develop on an industrial scale recycling technology by dissolving soils in order to recover PVC resin.
• OREADE : This incinerator project is expected to recover salt from end-of-life soils.

Gerflor is an active contributor to Vinyl Plus, the programme that brings together the European PVC industry's voluntary commitments to sustainable development.

RecoVynil: This network connects recyclers and PVC manufacturers in Europe. Its objective is to develop and certify the recycling of 90,000 tonnes of PVC by 2025.