Used Carpet Recycling.

An Industry Poised for Vast Growth

As consumer demand increases for recycled carpet and products that contain recycled components, carpet and fiber producers are pursuing programs that reduce, reuse and recycle raw materials.

Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

"When we initiated this program there were few end-uses for recycled carpet and the program was consumer driven," said Mark Ryan, manager of environmental initiatives, DuPont Flooring Systems.

Today, used-carpet recycling is driven more by consumer demand than profit. But that's changing. The result of well-placed research dollars throughout the 1990s and the efforts of the carpet manufacturing industry has been a boom in the variety of products that primarily consist of recycled carpet components. This young industry is on the threshold of becoming a major, profitable venture.

Used-carpet recycling programs were first introduced to commercial carpet retailers as a tool that appealed to an ecologically conscious market. "Our recycling program provides commercial carpet dealers an incentive and a tool for selling DuPont-made products," Ryan said. "They can assure the customer that the used carpet will be collected and recycled, while helping the client to specify either a carpet constructed from recycled material or one that can be recycled when the time comes. It is a great tool for the retailer"

As more commercial carpet retailers entered into carpet recycling programs, the infrastructure necessary to operate these programs also grew. "Collecting, sorting and transporting used carpet was a mammoth challenge," said Carroll Turner, technical program director of the Carpet and Rug Institute. "But now, several carpet and fiber companies and individual entrepreneurs have established a network of collection sites throughout North America."

The DuPont Carpet Reclamation Program has established 80 collection sites, while Evergreen Nylon Recycling LLC, a joint venture between DSM Chemicals and Honeywell, will collect from an installation site or from a retailer's place of business.

Collecting, sorting and identifying used carpet once was a challenge for the industry, but now new technologies are making this task easier. "Carpet is primarily a manmade fiber, a thermoplastic with more than 250 different forms," Turner said. "Backings and latex have various values and come in a tremendous variety of combinations, some obvious and some proprietary." Affordable new technology such as Honeywell's CarPID, which uses near infrared analysis, is capable of identifying all the major fiber types.