January/February 2012
Despite a decade of growth in carpet recycling, an enormous volume of carpet still ends up in U.S. landfills. Recyclers wonder whether new incentives and mandates will help the industry overcome significant barriers.
By Ellen Ryan
What does the carpet beneath your feet have to do with a Ford Mustang cylinder head? They might be the same material in different forms. What exists as soft carpet today could become part of a sports car tomorrow, thanks to the growth of carpet recycling and the use of recycled carpet material.
Modern U.S. carpet recycling started only a couple of decades ago, says Georgina Sikorski, executive director of Carpet America Recovery Effort (Dalton, Ga.), the joint industry-government group created in 2002 to increase the recycling of postconsumer carpet. The industry has grown, albeit slowly, over the years. The United States discards more than 6 billion pounds of postconsumer carpet annually, according to 2002 estimates. CARE, which has collected data on carpet recovery and recycling since its founding, reports that about 4.5 percent of discarded carpet was diverted from landfills for recycling in 2010. That’s up about 10 percent from 2009 and is nearly six times the amount diverted in 2002. Another 1.1 percent of postconsumer carpet was diverted to be reused, reconditioned, or used as fuel in cement kilns or waste-to-energy facilities, CARE reports, but the industry still has a long way to go to address the mountain of used carpet supply. It’s estimated that 3 to 4 percent of everything in U.S. landfills is carpet, says Gail Brice, vice president for business development at The Carpet Recyclers, a La Mirada, Calif., company that collects and processes residential carpet, commercial broadloom, and carpet tile. “It’s bulky, it’s heavy, it doesn’t degrade, and you’re wasting the oil resources in the carpet [if it becomes waste], so it’s a very good thing to keep out of landfills.”
The biggest milestone in carpet recycling to date was the 2002 memorandum of understanding that created CARE. At the time, five companies involved in diverting and recycling postconsumer carpet joined manufacturers; entrepreneurs; local, state, and federal officials; and nongovernmental groups to write a 10-year plan for developing markets for recycled carpet. Since then, CARE’s reclamation network has grown to 105 companies around the country. Several phenomena have the potential to drive further growth. First, carpet and other demolition debris recycling factors into Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification, the sought-after measure of “green” buildings. Some local governments are mandating it as well: Brice says managers of demolition jobs in many California cities must put down a deposit they can recover only when they prove they have recycled a certain proportion of their debris. And growing numbers of carpet buyers are demanding that their old carpet be recycled or that new carpet contain recycled content. The federal government now requires its substantial purchases of carpet to meet the gold level of the NSF/ANSI 140 sustainability standard, which takes into account the carpet manufacturer’s reclamation, recycling, and use of recycled materials. Other large governmental and institutional buyers are using contract language that requires environmentally friendly disposal of old carpet and/or the purchase of sustainable new carpet. With this potential growth in carpet collection and growth in demand for carpet made from recycled materials, the remaining challenge is the processing—ensuring the incoming supply or the processing methods can result in feedstock suitable for carpet or other end products.
Collecting, Sorting, and Processing
Postconsumer carpet recycling begins with collection, which starts when contractors pull out old carpet before laying new carpet in a house, apartment building, school, or hospital. Traditionally they would leave it on the ground or in a container until they take it and other demolition debris to the landfill. To capture this supply, carpet collectors and processors have to make themselves an economically attractive and convenient alternative.
Local economic conditions—including supply, demand, and landfill tipping fees—dictate whether the collector or processor charges to accept the material, takes it for free, or pays its suppliers. At Tandus Flooring in Dalton, Ga., “we don’t charge the customer; we have at times paid [our suppliers],” says Marketing Director Ross Leonard. Most recyclers don’t find that model sustainable, however. At Bro-Tex in St. Paul, Minn., for instance, the company will accept carpet for recycling at half the price of what it costs to landfill it. “Our collectors appreciate that,” says Chris Kiesling, manager of recycling operations. Companies such as these make recycling convenient by placing a large, closed container at carpet or home-improvement stores for installers to deposit old carpet, or they leave a trailer or container at a demolition site for the crew.
Processing begins with sorting the carpet by fiber type and looking for contaminants. Recyclers test incoming material several times with a small, expensive hand-held analyzer that uses near-infrared spectroscopy to discern one fiber type from another. Carpet’s face fiber—the part people walk on—is most often nylon 6 or nylon 66. About 12 percent is polypropylene; a small but rapidly growing proportion (another 12 percent) is polyethylene terephthalate; and less than 1 percent is wool. Processors must sort the incoming carpet by fiber type because each has its own chemical properties, which dictate how they turn it into feedstock. “You can’t tell the difference with your eyes; you have to use [an anaylzer], which adds cost,” says Russ DeLozier, manager of material reclamation at Shaw Industries, a carpet manufacturer and recycler in Dalton, Ga. “If we put nylon 66 accidentally into the nylon 6 process, it could unintentionally shut the plant down,” causing significant costs and delays.
About 80 percent of recovered carpet gets recycled. Some cannot be recycled using existing processes because it contains both nylon 6 and nylon 66. Use of this mixed-fiber carpeting can vary by region, says Paul Reynolds, president of Reynolds Urethane Recycling (Middleton, Wis.), which collects, sorts, and bales or rolls scrap carpet and ships it to processors. It’s about 8 to 10 percent of the supply in his area, he says. The primary reason otherwise recyclable scrap carpet does not get recycled, however, is contamination. Some contamination comes from careless handling of carpet during its removal, when other demolition debris ends up in the load. DeLozier lists what has arrived at recycling facilities in truckloads of carpeting: “doorknobs, nails, cans, a wedding ring, .22 bullets, a toilet, a typewriter, vacuum cleaners. People have to sort these [loads] manually.” Carpet tack strips and nails are common and serious problems because “a piece of metal will tear up your equipment,” says Ray Hampton, president of Cycle-Tex (Dalton, Ga.), which buys postindustrial PP and some baled postconsumer carpet from collectors across the country. A magnet might help, but not for bits of stainless steel or aluminum. Contaminants that are not easily removed and can make carpet unrecyclable include paint and drywall mud. Carpet recyclers are working to educate collectors on their needs and create economic incentives by favoring those who supply cleaner materials and charging more to those who don’t.
A flood can quickly ruin an otherwise good carpet, so it’s unfortunate that excessive moisture also impedes carpet recycling. It makes carpet heavier and louses up fiber-testing devices and other machinery, recyclers say, not to mention the potential for moist carpet to contain mold or mildew. Collectors are using more closed containers and overhangs to protect their supply from rain. On the processing end, some machinery has been retrofitted “to handle a little more” moisture, says Kasey Kruse, president and co-owner of Kruse Carpet Recycling (Indianapolis), which collects, sorts, and packages postconsumer and commercial carpet and does some processing. “But if a basement floods, [that] carpet is pretty well unrecyclable.”
Glue is a contamination problem in commercial carpet. “Most processes can handle a certain amount,” Kruse says. DeLozier adds that with glue, “fresh, rather than aged, hard, and brittle, is the worst.” At Shaw Industries, “we’ve learned to minimize this problem with process changes,” he says, most notably by modifying the equipment and alternating the processing of commercial and residential carpet. At Kruse Carpet Recycling, carpet with too much glue or other contaminants gets sent to a waste-to-energy facility in downtown Indianapolis. “We have a no-landfill policy, so this is the next step better,” Kruse says.
Most recovered carpet that does not get recycled—particularly some commercial carpet—gets used as fuel in a cement kiln or waste-to-energy facility, according to CARE. Though it’s not recycling, this use is “a great way to reduce the use of natural resources,” says Thomas Holland, president and CEO of Texas Carpet and Construction Recycling (Grapevine, Texas), a collector of primarily commercial carpet that sorts it by fiber type and ships it to processors. Being petroleum products, carpet fiber and carpet backing have a high energy content that’s comparable to coal, several recyclers say.
Because recovered carpet is so difficult to handle and expensive to transport, it tends to stay relatively close to home for processing. In 2010, 91 percent of recovered postconsumer carpet remained in the United States; 6 percent was exported to Asia, CARE reports.
Consumer carpet typically has more face fiber than industrial carpet. This makes it more valuable, as the face fiber is more widely recycled than the backing. Processors cut large pieces of carpet to a manageable size and shear off the face fiber as close to the backing as they can—or they shred it—and send the backing to a landfill or WTE plant. The fiber gets processed into feedstock for new resin, new carpet, or another product. Commercial carpet tiles, including their backing, are fully recyclable, but some also end up either landfilled or burned for fuel.
Often carpet recyclers collect residential carpet cushion or padding as well, which can be used to make new padding. Its value fluctuates with supply, demand, and the cost of oil. With the housing market down, the price of padding is down, too, Kiesling says. “Anyone trying to get rid of padding is having a hard time,” Holland says. “We’re baling it and waiting for demand to pick up to make it into [residential] rebond pad.” Rubber padding typically cannot be recycled because of its adhesives, he adds, so the company sells it to WTE facilities.
Old Carpet’s New Life
Though some old carpet does become new carpet, that’s not the most common destination for the recycled material. According to CARE, 58 percent of recycled carpet becomes engineered resins for auto parts and other products, 18 percent becomes carpet fiber, 13 percent becomes carpet backing, and 5 percent becomes carpet cushion. Two percent becomes molded or extruded products.
Looking at each of the common types of carpet fiber separately, demand for nylon 66 is at a peak now because of its many industrial uses, Holland says. When depolymerized and turned back into its precursor, caprolactam, nylon 6 can be recycled into new carpet again and again and again, DeLozier says. It also can become computer screens, Reynolds points out. With its high heat resistance, nylon is a popular ingredient in bearings, gears, engine moldings, and other mechanical parts, especially in motor vehicles (for example, those Ford Mustang cylinder heads). Nylon also is strong and wear-resistant, so other uses include everything from fishing line and toothbrush bristles to plastic lumber. “With petroleum prices high, it makes more sense to use recycled nylon,” Kruse says.
If they’re clean enough, PP carpet fibers can become feedstock for any other PP product, say Kiesling and others, from molded seating and septic tanks to plastic pipes, auto bumpers, and even horse racetracks. The least desirable face fiber seems to be PET. This material theoretically could become PET food and drink containers, but few facilities can clean and purify it sufficiently to meet food-use standards. Further, “virgin PET is less expensive than nylon, so by the time you harvest and process the postconsumer PET carpet, it’s not [cost-efficient] for replacing virgin material,” Sikorski explains. Currently most recycled PET carpet becomes carpet padding, but that’s a small market, she says. “There’s not enough business making [PET carpet] into carpet cushion. We need other outlets and are working on that.” One processor probably speaks for many when he says of PET carpet, “we don’t buy it. Waste-to-energy is really all I know to do with it.” Shaw Industries owns an interest in a product that can be made from any synthetic carpet fiber: GeoHay, a geotextile designed to be a sustainable, reusable replacement for hay bales used to filter stormwater and prevent soil erosion and sediment runoff.
These are all uses for face fiber, but as much as 80 percent of a carpet’s weight is the backing, or carcass. Carpet backing might consist of latex, nylon, PP, soy, fiberglass, rubber, polyurethane, polyester, and PVC, plus calcium carbonate and glue to hold things together. As Kruse puts it, “carpet is made to be indestructible,” which also makes it difficult to process for recycling.
The Carpet Recyclers is one of the few companies that doesn’t send backing to a landfill or WTE facility. “I’d like to think our facility is the future of carpet recycling,” Brice says. This “first-of-its-kind, zero-waste-to-landfill” facility opened in January 2011. In addition to shearing the face fiber from the carpet for recycling, the company shreds and separates the carpet backing into three additional products—substitutes for virgin nylon, PP, and limestone—that manufacturers can use in a range of products. By processing the whole carpet, not just the face fiber, the company says the facility will have saved more than 4 million gallons of oil and created more than 100 “green” jobs in its first year. Reynolds says carpet can be ground up and mixed with clay used in a flexible cap for landfills—“clay toppers”—or added to asphalt. “It lasts forever and has a lot of give to it, a rubberized type of feel,” he says.
SelecTech in Avon, Mass., manufactures interlocking, decorative floor tiles out of recycled carpet, backing and all. The company buys granulated, vinyl-backed commercial carpet (which contains little fiber) and, in a patented process, uses it in the tile’s lower layer. That layer consists entirely of recycled material, 70 percent of which is recycled carpet. SelecTech plans to recycle 3 million to 5 million pounds of carpet this year, says Michael King, the company’s vice president of operations. Having a bit of fiber in the mix is fine, he adds. Nylon “melts at a much higher temperature than vinyl does, so we never get to the point of melting the nylon.” The company touts the cost-efficiency of using recycled, postconsumer carpet, which is much less expensive than virgin vinyl. “The challenge to recycling is either you have commingled materials that are hard to separate and make as pure as possible,” King explains, “or [you take] our approach, which is to develop the capacity to use simply processed materials. We can use low-end, low-cost materials effectively.” This is the key to a robust carpet recycling market, say Sikorski and several carpet processors. “More demand means more carpet kept from the landfill,” Sikorski says. “We could use more products that use postconsumer content—the more consumer products we can make with postconsumer carpet, the more carpet we can keep out of the landfill.”
Developing such products and the markets for them can take years. Similarly, it has been a slow process to teach building owners, contractors, and carpet buyers that landfill alternatives exist; to overcome the perception that recycling costs more than landfilling; and to expand the thin network of collectors and processors to a wider geographic area. (“The recycling plant needs to be near the collection point,” points out one plastics recycling expert, “because no one’s going to collect carpet in Georgia and ship it to a plant in Seattle.”)
Despite those challenges, carpet processors are uniformly optimistic: More companies are getting into the business, and technology is evolving to allow the use of more fiber types in more products. “The key is inventing a process to use enough carpet for enough end products to create pull-through for the long term,” Holland says. He leaves no doubt as to what will solve that problem: “Good old American ingenuity.”
Ellen Ryan is a Rockville, Md.-based writer.
California Takes an EPR Approach to Carpet
“We’re all keeping an eye on California.” That was the comment of several carpet processors, referring to the state’s new carpet stewardship law, which makes carpet recovery and recycling the responsibility of carpet manufacturers. Processors expect the law to affect the price of new carpet, the value of old carpet, potential markets for recycled material, and more.
AB 2398 was signed into law Sept. 30, 2010, with the goal of increasing recycling and decreasing the amount of carpet going to landfills. The state planned to finalize regulations for implementing the law in December. The law is unique, says Georgina Sikorski, executive director of Carpet America Recovery Effort (Dalton, Ga.), because it’s the first in the nation to take an extended producer responsibility approach to carpet. Its impact is evident in that 18 businesses now collect, sort, and process carpet in the state—there were “a lot fewer” 18 months ago, she says.
On July 1, the state implemented an advance recovery fee on carpet purchases—5 cents per square yard of commercial and residential carpet sold in the state. Manufacturers that sell carpet in the state had a deadline of Sept. 30, 2011, to submit to CalRecycle a stewardship plan for how they will comply with and meet the goals of the law or sign on to the stewardship plan developed by CARE. (So far, more than 75 companies have done the latter.) The carpet assessment will not be used to reimburse recyclers for their processing costs; instead, the fund—estimated at $5 million a year—will give incentive payments to carpet processors who have shredded, sheared, and sold postconsumer carpet output to manufacturers. The processors can use the payments to invest in processing technology, collection methods, and new products that increase carpet recycling and markets for recycled carpet. “Because of this, things that weren’t economically viable are becoming so,” says Gail Brice, vice president for business development at The Carpet Recyclers in La Mirada, Calif.
The law “provides needed capital to the industry,” says Thomas Holland, president and CEO of Texas Carpet and Construction Recycling (Grapevine, Texas), but he worries about the consequences of a rapid increase in carpet collection. “There’s not enough capacity now to absorb all the carpet being collected,” he says, though “it’s too early to tell if this will be a lasting supply and demand problem.
“What’s encouraging about AB 2398 is that it’s in one place,” he adds. “You can see the causes and effects.”
Despite a decade of growth in carpet recycling, an enormous volume of carpet still ends up in U.S. landfills. Recyclers wonder whether new incentives and mandates will help the industry overcome significant barriers.