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Tile Take-back

The program

Crossville, Inc.'s revolutionary Tile Take-Back™ Program helps collect and recycle millions of pounds of fired, post-consumer porcelain tile every year in the United States, enabling us to maintain net waste consumption at our plants since 2012. It's a program we're proud to have pioneered, and one that we welcome you to join.

How we got started

While many tile manufacturers, including Crossville itself, had been successfully reusing powders and unfired tile, both pre- and post-consumer fired porcelain tile (tile in its finished state) was considered non-recyclable. Every year, manufacturers dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of damaged, scrap, or otherwise unsellable fired tile into landfills. Additionally, there was no known environmentally-friendly way to dispose of previously installed, post-consumer tile.

All that changed in 2009, when we introduced the Tile Take-Back Program.

How it works

Creating an open recycling program enables us to reduce the burden on even more landfills, while minimizing our own demand for new, raw materials. We accept not only our own scrap, but previously installed tile from the Crossville distribution network and post-consumer tile from other manufacturers and projects. It's a builder community effort that, when everyone works together to recycle porcelain and tile waste, results in huge value for raw material conservation.

Once the porcelain and tile waste is collected, it enters our proprietary recycling process. Once processed, the material is either sold to third-parties or reused in Crossville recycled tile products. In fact, every piece of tile we product is made with, at the very least, 4% pre-consumed, recycled content.

Thanks to an expansion of our recycling program through a partnership established with sanitary wares manufacturer TOTO USA® in 2011, we’re also able to recycle pre-consumer porcelain toilets and other cast-off products that would normally be discarded.

By launching this truly innovative porcelain recycling effort, Crossville has become the first-ever net consumer of tile waste—meaning we recycle more than we produce.

Contact us to participate in the Tile Take-Back program.