Mohawk Industries
Bart Rich, director of brand management, said one of the most significant sustainability stories in the last year has been Mohawk’s use of new technology to expand the use of post-consumer recycled PET in its EverStrand carpet fiber.
Until this year, he explained, the recycled PET could only be used in staple fiber styles, “limiting its use and missing the much larger BCF fiber market. Mo- hawk’s new fiber manufacturing process overcomes this problem by allowing recycled PET content to be incorporated into EverStrand BCF styles. What’s more, the technology allows the use of post-consumer recycled PET in all EverStrand fiber, including XtraSoft styles, which we introduced last year.”
EverStrand, Rich said, is one of the most successful recycling stories in the industry with more than 24 billion soft drink bottles— 25% of the bottles recycled in North America—going into the branded fiber. On average, 30 plastic bottles are recycled to make one square yard of EverStrand carpet with staple fiber.
When it comes to actually recycling carpet, Jenny Cross, Mohawk’s director of sustainability, called it “challenging. It’s a system of a number of components—fiber, backing layers, adhesives—and recycling requires these to be separated. Historically, no one had a viable solution for dealing with latex backing material until now.”
Recently, Mohawk created and has licensed recycling technology to Polar Materials of Covington, Ga., which specializes in the use of recycled materials to replace mined minerals. “Utilizing a patent-pending process from Polar,” she explained, “Mohawk is now using carpet backing filler created from recycled carpet waste—“helping significantly reduce the amount of carpet waste sent to the landfill every year.”
How much? The annual consumption of limestone in carpet exceeds 800,000 tons per year, Cross said. “Replacing just 35% of it with this process can potentially divert more than 280,000 tons of carpet from landfills each year.”
The recycled filler satisfies Sustainable Carpet Assessment Standard NSF-140, and is currently being used in the Mohawk Home division with plans to expand its use.
“This is a big step,” Cross noted. “Not only are we finding a use for recycled latex backing material, the most common backing for residential carpet, we’re utilizing it to manufacture new carpet that is in compliance with a key environmental standard.”