One of the most pressing environmental concerns in our day is what to do with the billions of pounds of post-consumer waste that is discarded every year. This waste is rapidly filling our landfills and can pose serious environmental threats. As the largest recycler in the flooring industry, Mohawk has developed several initiatives to address this problem, and these initiatives are already making a real difference for the environment. We are taking all kinds of items that have reached the end of their natural life cycle – items that would otherwise be thrown away – and are using them to make high quality carpet backings, carpet cores, nylon resins, and other products. Here are some examples of post-consumer waste we are keeping out of landfills and putting to good use.
Plastic Bottles – As one of the world’s largest recyclers of plastic bottles, we take approximately 25% of all the plastic beverage and food bottles collected in North America. and recycle them into carpet fibers. This diverts an enormous amount of PET plastic from landfills.
Tires / Crumb Rubber – Tires are one of the largest and most hazardous kinds of post-consumer waste. We divert over 30 million lbs. of tires from landfills every year by turning the resulting crumb rubber into thousands of designer doormats. That represents 2.1 million tires, 83 times the number of tires on taxicabs in the whole city of Chicago.
Auto Glass – Several of our most popular backing systems now contain significant amounts of post-consumer automobile glass in their material make up.
Bottle Caps / Labels – In addition to recycling the bottles themselves, we even capture the bottle caps and labels and use them to make high quality plastic carpet cores.
Shrink-Wrap – In an effort to divert even more plastic from landfills, we take used shrink-wrap and incorporate it into the manufacture of our carpet cores.
Fibers – The extrusion and tufting of our various carpet face fibers results in significant amounts of PET waste. Instead of simply disposing of this waste, we send it to our materials reclamation center and recycle it for use in other products such as synthetic carpet padding.
Post-Consumer Carpet – Through our ReCover program, we collect old carpet that is being replaced and recycle. Not only do we use collected Mohawk carpeting, but we will even pick up and recycle other manufacturers’ brands. This eliminates virtually all of the major environmental effects of carpet replacement.
Latex – We recycle latex based carpets and use the resulting post-consumer content to make more carpeting by processing the carpet material through several ingenious steps and purifying it to make many new carpet components, such as backing systems.