John Bradshaw

Dalton— Shaw Industries has appointed John Bradshaw to the newly created position of environmental marketing manager to aid in the mill’s restart of the Evergreen nylon recycling facility and the collection of post-consumer carpet to supply it. Evergreen is the only large scale post-consumer nylon recycling facility in the world.

Bradshaw has been with Shaw for 18 years, having joined the company through its Salem acquisition in 1992. Bradshaw spent much of his career with Shaw developing the Sherwin Williams business and has spent the last six years working with the Shaw Flooring Alliance program.

According to Scott Sandlin, vice president of residential marketing, Bradshaw’s initial focus will be to assist in developing an efficient network of collecting post-consumer carpet to supply the company’s Evergreen recycling facility in Augusta, Ga. “He will work closely with our marketing groups and our collection team as Shaw becomes the first flooring manufacturer to take post-consumer carpet and convert it back into nylon to go into new carpet.”

“As we progress,” Sandlin added, “he will assist us in developing and communicating our environmental leadership message for the field organization.”

The Evergreen process will save the energy equivalent of 16 million gallons of gasoline annually compared to virgin nylon production, and will reduce the amount of virgin crude oil used to make Shaw’s EcoSolution Q and other branded nylons. Steve Bradfield, corporate director of environmental affairs, stated, “Shaw’s recycled nylon is used in commercial carpet and will later be introduced into residential markets, where demand for environmentally preferable product solutions is growing.”

Vance Bell, Shaw’s new CEO as of the Sept. 1, retirement of founder Robert Shaw, remarked, “Shaw expects to reopen the facility in the first half of 2007 and process 100 million pounds of post-consumer nylon carpet into 30 million pounds of caprolactam monomer, the building block of nylon 6. The nationwide Shaw collection system consists of a growing number of Shaw dealer-customers and other specialized broadloom recyclers that share our vision of a stable, closed-loop recycling system that reduces waste and encourages recycling.”

According to Bradfield, the system may collect up to 300 million pounds of carpet of all types annually. Carpets not recycled by Evergreen will be recycled by others for recovery of nylon 6,6 and polypropylene, and some carpets will find their way into clean waste-to-energy applications.

For more on Shaw and its products, call 706/278-3812.
—Louis Iannaco