Recycled Bottle Carpet by Mohawk Flooring
Americans, collectively, replace about 5 billion pounds of carpeting every year. That’s a lot of rug! Carpet manufacturers are doing their best to come up with more eco-friendly options for consumers to help them feel better about the replacement carpeting they put in their homes as well as to reduce the affect their products have on the environment.
Several carpet makers have caught on to the idea of using recycled plastic soda bottles in the production of the fibers that their carpets consist of. For every square yard of carpeting, manufacturers recycle 30-40 two-liter soda bottles.
This scares me a little - I imagine a crunchy carpeting that hurts your feet or at least one that is stiff and plastic-y looking (more like the old car carpeting). In reality, though, the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) carpeting, as it is known, is “luxuriously soft,” says Mohawk Flooring.
Apparently by using plastic soda bottles to make carpet strands the PET rugs are stronger and more colorfast and stain-resistant than nylon carpeting. The carpets are made completely with post-consumer products, meaning that there are no materials in the production of these rugs that are used solely for manufacturing -- they are all recycled products that would otherwise be in a landfill.
Mohawk claims that since they’ve started making PET carpeting in 1999 they’ve saved 17 billion plastic bottles from sitting in a landfill (which they equated to over 1 billion pounds of plastic waste).
In an effort to make complete use of the plastic bottles that they use in their carpeting, Mohawk also uses all of the other parts of the bottles, too. The labels and caps that have to come off of the bottles before they are recycled into carpet fiber are removed and recycled separately to be made into carpet cores. Previously the cores were made of cardboard (the large hard tubes around which a bolt of carpeting is rolled). When the carpet came off the core, the cardboard was then thrown away. Now, though, the recycled caps and labels become a much more durable core which can be used over and over again.
Not only are PET carpets great for the environment, they have several distinct advantages over other carpeting. The durability, colorfastness and stain-resistance I already mentioned, but they are also supremely wear-resistant, vibrantly colored, soft, great for static control, and possess a lower rate of moisture absorption.