Creating fully recyclable carpets and mattresses

The chemical industry is constantly designing solutions to re-enter end-of-life products back into the cycle or re-design products so they can easily be recycled.

DSM Niaga focuses on redesigning products, by keeping the design simple, only working with clean materials and reversible connections between materials to ensure that all components of the final product are recyclable and the product never goes to waste. As a result, the concept of a fully recyclable carpet has emerged.

In the EU, 1.6 million tonnes of carpets go to waste every year. Most of it goes to landfill or incineration and only 1-3% is recycled. This is because carpets are made of multiple layers of various materials, making them expensive and technically difficult to recycle. But the carpet designed by DSM Niaga can be easily recycled into pure material streams that can be re-used again and again to make a brand new carpet of the same quality.

Building on the redesign of carpets into fully circular carpets, DSM Niaga has now also developed a fully circular mattress together with the Dutch mattress manufacturer Auping. Thanks to this technology only two different materials are used in the mattresses, enabling easy reuse and/or recycling of the different components and layers in the mattresses.