Here’s an interesting development on the part of a giant fashion retailer with stores across Europe. C&A has laid floors made with recycled denim fabric surplus in “a pioneering effort to repurpose textile remnants for its new store locations”.

The flooring solution has debuted with the reopening of its flagship store on Mariahilfer Strasse, one of the largest and most famous shopping streets in Vienna. The next store to feature the denim floor will be in the Parquesur shopping center in Leganés, Madrid, in December.

The material uses surplus denim material from C&A’s FIT (Factory for Innovation in Textiles) in Mönchengladbach, with plans to incorporate denim collected from customers in the future. 

For each square metre of flooring, approximately one kilo of denim offcuts is recycled, contributing to a reduction in unused textiles while creating a visual impact in the stores.

The denim floor was developed by the Swiss family enterprise LICO, and as well as the denim offcuts, it uses cork underlays from the bottling industry, and wood-based boards. To process the denim fibres into flooring, natural products, such as vegetable fats and natural rubber, are used. 

The flooring is being tested as an exclusive pilot project by C&A.

Its new denim floor has been awarded the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) and the Blue Angel ecolabel by the German federal government.