With a passion for sustainability, Riccardo Cenedella is a recently graduated from MA Material Futures at Central Saint Martins in London.

During this year, Riccardo developed his project Carpet Matter, a project about regenerating carpet waste to create new functional objects.

The UK produces around 400.000 tonnes of carpet waste each year because it is a composite product that was never designed for disassembly. Unfortunately, there is only a small amount of carpet waste that is being fully recycled in a closed-loop system, the rest of it is sent to incinerators or gets deposited in landfills.

Through hands-on experimentation with synthetic materials, of which the vast majority of carpet is now made of, he developed a technique that allows him to reshape and repurpose this material for the creation of new design artefacts, avoiding carpet from ending up in dumpsites.

The final output is a collection of furniture made using carpet waste collected from local shops. The aims of this project are to raise environmental awareness and demonstrate how a wasted material can be transformed into something valuable and usable again.