Carpet companies are going green both in the manufacturing of new products and in the disposal of old ones.
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Staff Photo by Brett Clark -- Shaw Industries Plant 15 in Cartersville, Ga., recycles carpet tiles and scraps to make new carpet tile.
Industry observer Kemp Harr, publisher of Floor Focus magazine and Floordaily.net, said the carpet industry is well ahead of most industries in the shift to green.
“All of the big players have a green story,” Mr. Harr said.
From spinning recycled soft drink bottles into carpet fiber, to burning landfill gas or a corn-based biofuel for machinery power, to diverting used and discarded carpet from landfills for new floor coverings, rug makers have been the trailblazers, Mr. Harr said.
Rick Ramirez, Shaw Industries’ vice president of sustainability and environmental affairs, said Shaw has a Dalton plant that is converting carpet waste and wood dust from the wood flooring plants to the steam energy that powers it’s plant. The effort means less waste and less emissions, but it also is gre another way, he said. It is expected to save the plant more than $1 million in natural gas costs yearly.
“It’s good for society, good for the environment, and it’s good for the bottom line,” Mr. Ramirez said. “It becomes kind of a no-brainer, although it took a few years to be understood that way.”
Shaw has other environmentally friendly manufacturing efforts at different locations.
In Augusta, Ga., Shaw’s Evergreen Nylon Recycling facility uses used carpet diverted from landfills to make the base chemical to make new carpet.
“This is a demonstration of what’s called cradle-to-cradle manufacturing where you basically see no waste,” Mr. Ramirez said, noting that just in the plant’s first year it has diverted 100 million pound of carpet from landfills and accounted for the production of nearly 10 percent of Shaw’s new top-grade carpet.
In addition, the company’s EcoWorx carpet backing, introduced in 1999 for carpet tiles, now is being expanded to broadloom carpet, he said. The EcoWorx lightweight and recyclable design earned it the 2003 Presidential Green Chemistry Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Because it is lighter that other backings, it allows more carpet product to be moved at one time, lowering shipping costs and using less gasoline, he said.
Mohawk Industries also has been working on multiple green initiatives.
FAST FACTS
* Mohawk’s Smartstand carpet is 37 percent corn sugar, a renewable resource requiring 30 percent less energy than the production of an equal amount of nylon and 63 percent less greenhouse gas emissions.
* Shaw’s Greenedge initiative to use recycled carpet to make Nylon 6 fiber keeps up to 300 million pounds of carpet from landfills each year, saving enough energy to run thousands of homes each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent since 2000.
Source: Company Web sites
Open since 1999, Mohawk’s plastic bottle recycling facility in Summerville, Ga., turns a quarter of the nation’s 215 million pounds of recycled plastic bottles into polyethylene terephthalate carpet fiber.
The company also converts more than 30 million pounds of tires into door mats each year, and in Loudon, Tenn., Mohawk, partnering with a bio-fuel company, is turning corn-pulp into carpet fiber.
“Most people say one person’s trash becomes another person’s treasure. But Mohawk lives by it,” according to the company’s Web site. “More than 500 Mohawk products — carpet, carpet tiles, laminate, and ceramic tile — contain recycled materials.”
Shaw’s Mr. Ramirez said it in a slightly different way:
“One man’s trash is another’s raw materials,” he said. “Today the term is more sustainability than just pure conservation.”
Pam Sohn has been reporting or editing Chattanooga news for 25 years. A Walden’s Ridge native, she began her journalism career with a 10-year stint at the Anniston (Ala.) Star. She came to the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 1999 after working at the Chattanooga Times for 14 years. She has been a city editor, Sunday editor, wire editor, projects team leader and assistant lifestyle editor. As a reporter, she also has covered the police, ...
