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Flooring products including vinyl, carpet, laminate, and timber flooring contribute to the roughly 2.2 billion tonnes of waste globally generated from construction and demolition activities. Most of this waste is created through installation offcuts, refurbishment projects, and end-of-life replacement. At Altro’s Melbourne office, the team wanted to refresh the space while demonstrating how Altro’s adhesive-free flooring can reduce disruption while supporting a circular economy.
During the refurbishment, existing Altro Wood adhesive-free flooring was uplifted from one area and successfully reused in another part of the same room. This made the refurbishment simple, clean, quick and demonstrated the easy reusability of Altro’s adhesive-free range. Uplifted Altro Cantata from another part of the room was also sent for recycling capability testing, opening up another avenue for circularity. Altro APAC worked with Josh Alford from JA Floors, a Melbourne-based flooring contractor, to refurbish the floors and prepare the uplifted Altro Cantata for recycling. Additionally, we continue to work with ResiLoop, an organisation built to tackle resilient flooring waste in Australia. Altro was one of ResiLoop’s founding members and has maintained a strong relationship with the organisation since its inception. When the opportunity arose to explore the recyclability of one of our ranges, ResiLoop was a natural partner. ResiLoop put the uplifted Altro Cantata through a recycling trial, where it successfully completed Phase 1.
The project demonstrated circular flooring in action by immediately reusing adhesive-free flooring while supporting the long-term recycling of Altro Cantata. Additionally, using adhesive-free flooring as opposed to traditional glued-down vinyl allowed us to reduce installation time by 50% and avoid dust and glue smells, allowing our team to return to their desks the very next day.
We’re excited about the prospect of being able to recycle uplifted adhesive-free flooring and turn it into a usable product. Phase 1 testing of Altro Cantata has been completed successfully, and further testing will help confirm the product’s end-of-life recycling potential.
I’ve worked with Altro for a long time and have been laying their adhesive-free floors for years. It’s easy to work with and super quick to install, specially when comparing to glued-down vinyl flooring. When doing their office flooring refurb, we were in and out in 6 hours, which included a fair bit of detailed work like a custom logo install, and curved shapes, and relaying recycled product in other sections. A glued-down job of this nature would have taken double the amount of time, and you would have had dust and glue smells.
