Our Team
The Board and senior management team at Innovate Recycle are passionate about achieving our objective of changing how the UK handles waste and end-of-life carpet and bringing a new supply of reclaimed polypropylene and calcium carbonate to the emerging circular economy.
Our Board Members
Joseph Eccleston
CEO and Founder
After taking over the family retail carpet business, Joseph became aware of the amount of polypropylene carpet waste they generated every year and began researching ways of recycling.
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When he found that no-one in the UK was deconstructing carpets and doing something with the elements, he set up a research and development project to search for answers. He sold the family business in 2016 to finance the project.
Since partnering with a US firm that had some equipment to deconstruct carpet, he has moved the technology forwards with developments that improve the quality and purity of the polypropylene pellets that can be produced.
Joseph says: “I am proud of the team we have put together and I believe that we can be the answer to the carpet industry’s costly and damaging waste carpet problem. I want to see the carpet industry playing an important role in the Government’s aspirations for a circular plastics economy.”
“I am proud of the team we have put together and I believe that we can be the answer to the carpet industry’s costly and damaging waste carpet problem. I want to see the carpet industry playing an important role in the Government’s aspirations for a circular plastics economy.”
Bob Woods MBE
Chair
Bob Woods has spent his entire career in the financial services sector. He founded wealth management and employee benefit specialist Mattioli Woods, with Ian Mattioli, in the early 1990s, taking the business from a start-up to a listing on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. He received an MBE in 2017 for services to business and the community. In recent years, he has undertaken business mentoring for budding entrepreneurs and this is how he first met Joseph Eccleston.
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Bob says: “It is now clear to all that sustainability must be at the heart of everything we do in life if we are to deal with the immense challenges of not just climate change but also to build a sustainable economy. I am so very delighted to have been invited to be part of Innovate Recycle, a business that has found a solution to the seemingly intractable problem of recycling end-of-life polypropylene carpet.”
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Bob was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) by the University of Leicester. There he also supports research into the effects on the human body of long-term exposure to the thousands of toxins in everyday life. His interest in environmental health led him to endow a chair of Environmental Epidemiology which led to the establishment of the Bob Woods Professorship in Environmental, Health and Sustainability, now headed by Professor Anna Hansell.
Phil Sayers
Non-Executive Director
After 22 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Phil Sayers joined Grant Thornton in 2012 where he is an audit principal. He has vast experience of leading audit and advisory services for a wide variety of clients from start-up businesses to FTSE 250 enterprises.
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He has specialised in working with entrepreneurial, fast growth, start-ups and scale up companies, providing support and challenging their thinking to help them unlock their growth potential.
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Phil has worked on company flotations on various exchanges around the globe and has strong experience of working with private equity-backed start-ups and corporates as well as public sector bodies.
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Phil says: “I was first approached by Joe at the start of 2016 to do a specific piece of work for him. I was impressed by the vigour and dedication with which he had developed his idea and the thorough research he had done. It was this, coupled with the obvious ‘Green’ credentials of his project, that made me want to be part of the team and I have worked on Innovate Recycle with Joe and Bob ever since. The impact that Joe’s idea can have on reducing the amount waste going to landfill is truly inspiring.”
Tim Bagshaw
Non-Executive Director
Since the 1990s, Tim has worked in economic and business development. He has helped high-performance engineering firms and the logistics industry to forge close links with local and national government.
He has helped businesses attract new investment and develop mutually beneficial partnerships with the public sector.
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As Head of Business and innovation for the Northamptonshire Enterprise Partnership he worked at a senior level with both the public sector and with the University of Northampton. His connections here recommended him to Joseph and his role with Innovate Recycle is to position the company, and what it seeks to achieve, in a Government and investment setting.
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Tim says: “We are seeing the Government put an increasingly strong emphasis on the circular economy, effective recycling, reduction in waste and use of renewable energy sources and it is urging industries to do more. Joe has seized the challenge around carpet waste and in the absence of a proper, effective recycling solution for carpets in the UK he has developed an idea to recapture and re-use the resources they contain.”
Edmund Bacon
Non-Executive Director
Edmund trained as a chartered accountant with Smith and Williamson before setting up Hive Investments in 2017 to focus on acquiring and advising small businesses in the UK. From early on at Smith and Williamson he advised a varied mix of businesses ranging from recycling businesses to forex trading companies but since founding Hive has focused on businesses in the waste and events sectors. Aside from Hive and Innovate, Edmund is a Director of a London based property company having spent 3 years working in Real Estate Finance raising funds for property acquisitions.
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Edmund says: “I met Joe in the summer of 2020 when he came to us looking for investment. From a short call and meeting it was clear that Joe was a man of extraordinary enterprise, knowledge and belief. His goal of reducing and recycling waste and energy underpins everything at Innovate and it is great to be a part of this philosophy.”
Senior Management
Dave Robertson
Project Manager
Dave has extensive project management experience in construction and capital equipment manufacturing with companies such as Schindler, Otis and the Channel Tunnel. Skilled in negotiation, value engineering, budget control, and construction.
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Dave has strong programme & project management professional experience, is a Prince2 practitioner and will lead on building and plant installation control.
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Dave says: "No one in the UK has managed so far to provide a true recycling solution for waste carpet. At our new purpose built facility in Northamptonshire we will implement a low emission, green energy powered mechanical resource recapture process line for end-of-life carpet. We are at the forefront of real change and it is great to be part of the Innovate Recycle team as we begin this journey."
