In the photo are Bob Peoples, Director of Carpet America Recovery Effort presenting Jennifer Bishopp of MJ’s Event Services

It was a huge moment for MJ’s when we were announced as winners of the awards for Collaboration Partner and Take Back Partner of the Year the Carpet Recycling UK Awards event. Receiving these awards has been a validation of the effort and ethos that is central to MJ’s product and service offering. COP26 was a unique opportunity for us to showcase our strengths as well as stretching the boundaries of what can be achieved post event. The end result of 100,000 square metres of product supplied to COP26 with zero landfill is testament to MJ’s ethos and the collaborative efforts of our partners.

The exhibition and events industry, our core business, is by its nature a collaborative process. Event carpet recycling has been well established for a number of years and at MJ’s we emphasise the recyclable options of our core product offer. This includes previously unrecyclable products such as vinyl flooring and ancillary products such as underlay, cardboard tubes and polythene cover. There is now no need for any of this to go into a skip.

There is no escaping the fact that event carpet is an oil-based product with a direct cost in natural resources. There is also the time, material handling and associated fuel costs that can have an impact on the environmental footprint of the services that we offer. At MJ’s we are constantly searching for new ways to reduce these additional costs – whether through the reduction of road miles necessary to get post event carpet from the venues to end processors or reducing the number of times that the material needs to be physically handled. Even something as simple as making sure the appropriate size vehicles are sent to site can have a significant cumulative effect on the environmental cost of doing business.

This collaboration between MJ’s, venues, organisers, contractors and our logistics and processing partners is constantly evolving and represents a key part of what makes us successful. It is also the foundation upon which our business can grow.

Receiving these awards has validated all the hard work that our team puts into making sure that we are achieving our goals in reducing our carbon footprint, promoting recyclable products, educating our clients and passing on as much used product as we can to low income housing products to help to make someone’s house a home.

Carpet Recycling UK’s Adnan Zeb-Khan commented “these awards were very well-deserved and the efforts put in by MJ’s in order to repurpose the waste arising from its UK events, and notably for the COP26 contract were impressive and appreciated.  We hope that more event companies will be inspired by the proactivity of Jennifer and her team.  Outlets for event carpets are increasing and we encourage companies to come to us for information and contacts at the beginning of contracts to ensure that materials can be used again usefully at end of life.  Thanks MJ’s!”