By Jeff Carrier
Over the past decade, the carpet industry has transformed itself from an industry that makes products to an industry that makes a difference. Carpet’s journey toward sustainability started with baby steps, and progressed in breadth and scope with remarkable rapidity.

For most, waste reduction was the first focus, although the scope of environmental excellence spread quickly. The following are just some examples of what the carpet industry has accomplished so far.

The Carpet & Rug Institute’s (CRI) 2008 Sustainability Report documents an industry- wide water usage reduction of over 55% since1995. During that same period, energy use per unit of product was cut by over 70% and the amount of thermal fuels used to manufacture 1,000 square yards of carpet dropped by almost 50%.

The amount of CO2 emitted per square yard of carpet has been cut in half since 2003. At that time, the industry average output of CO2 was just over 1.8 pounds per square yard; by 2007 that figure had dropped .9 pounds. Responsibility for this reduction is due to improved electrical efficiency, increased use of bio-fuels, heat and process steam recapture, and less dependence on higher-emitting fuels, such as fuel oil No. 6. This is part of an overall industry move to cleaner, less climate-impacting operations.

In one Dalton latex plant, operations have been converted to use recycled gas from the local landfill. The technique is called Lomax technology, and by using it, the Styron (formerly Dow) plant, which produces styrene-butadiene rubber commonly used in carpet backings, has reduced its CO2 emissions by more than 86 million pounds in two years.

Impressive statistics like this don’t come over-night—they are the result of focusing year-after-year on maximizing energy-saving opportunities. For example, one CRI member discovered a deceptively simple solution to dramatically reduce its energy consumption: changing light bulbs.

Making the switch
More specifically, the company instituted a lighting retrofit that replaced existing lighting with higher-efficiency fixtures.

The results were impressive: total energy consumption from lighting dropped by 1.3 million kilowatts, for a total annual savings of $94,563. The first-year savings amounted to 45% of its expenditure on the retrofit. As of this writing, the company’s 10- year cumulative savings is projected to equal $945,630.

Beyond close to $1 million saved over a decade, the company anticipates significant environmental savings, such as a carbon dioxide reduction of 2.74 million pounds, nitrogen oxide reduction of 5,973 pounds and sulfur dioxide reduction of 16,478 pounds. That’s equivalent to taking 2,280 cars off the road and planting 318,810 trees in those 10 years.

Recycling is another area where the carpet industry is making history. Recycling is seen throughout the sector as a means for recovering the maximum possible value from spent carpet, and maximizing the conservation of environmental and economical resources. A brief survey of most CRI member websites will turn up a selection of products that feature postconsumer recycled content— some in very high levels.

The National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR, napcor.com) estimates 1.44 billion pounds of PET were available in 2009 for recycling. About 344 million pounds were redirected into the fibers industry. That’s nearly 24% of all U.S. collected bottles. Remove the 780 million pounds of collected bottles shipped out of the country, and this percentage climbs even more.

In other terms, one out of four bottles you put into the recycling bin last year ended up as carpet. These become the luxurious and durable polyester carpets you find at your retailer in a dizzying array of styles and colors.

Reusing other materials
How about nylon? Carpets made with postconsumer recycled nylon 6 and even nylon 6,6 options are available in an impressive variety of colors and styles. It’s true that a large percentage of a carpet’s total weight is in the backing material. The carpet industry is also a leader in using ground-up car windshields and ‘sands’ recovered from old carpet backing to construct backings for fashionable new carpets. Often, these recycled backing components alone can make up as much as 50% of the total weight of the carpet.

However, the carpet industry can’t recycle what it doesn’t have. Thanks to the efforts of the Carpet America Recovery Effort ( CARE), consumers can tap into a growing network of collectors who can take and process old carpet into the new, recycled-content carpet styles that are being offered by many of our member mills. In 2009, 65 collectors, including seven new participants, diverted 311 million pounds of carpet from landfills.

There’s more information on the CARE website, carpetrecovery.org, including a map that helps visitors find the recycling center closest to them.

PET plastic bottles (water, cola and juice, etc.) are much smaller and easier to handle than they once were. Dropping these empty bottles in blue recycling bins will help carpet manufacturers overcome the shortages predicted by NAPCOR. Yes, as remarkable as it may seem, NAPCOR expects that manufacturers will need more material to fill the consumer demand for recycled products.

Finally, residential and commercial consumers must commit themselves and their organizations to purchasing carpet products that contain recycled materials. The ideal solution is to look for commercial carpets certified to the NSF/ANSI 140 standard, which is the first-ever ANSI standard for product sustainability. The five tenets of the NSF 140 standard speak to the focus and intent of the carpet industry’s sustainability efforts: Public health and environment; energy/energy efficiency; materials (bio-based and recycled content); manufacturing, and end or life/reclamation.

Governmental recognition
The state of California and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania already require specifying products under NSF 140. There are many NSF 140-certified carpets, all listed on the CRI website. The 53 product groups certified as of press time represent thousands of style and color variations offered by the industry.

As you can see, there is much to be proud of in the carpet industry’s record on sustainability. Everyone connected with the the category shares a stake in its progress toward environmental sustainability.

One large CRI-member recently recognized four of its employees for their excellence in waste reduction in manufacturing— recognizing that excellence begins on the manufacturing floor. Carpet manufacturers as well as suppliers are focused on sustainable growth, and creating high-performance products while decreasing their environmental footprint for the benefit of future generations.

Sustainability means more than just recycling; it’s an entire shift in the way a company thinks about its products and manufacturing processes in relation to the environment. The carpet industry can only benefit from its commitment to sustainability.

Shortly after the Carpet & Rug Institute released its 2000 Sustainability Report, Matthew Realff, a professor of engineering at Georgia Tech, said at the time the amount of energy reduction reported by the carpet industry was equivalent to the annual emissions of 226,000 cars, or approximately the number of cars licensed annually in the entire metropolitan area of Washington, D.C.

Numbers like these are certainly impressive. Still, one of the challenges of doing such a remarkable job on the environment is that it requires constantly increasing one’s effort to uncover more and more innovative ways to improve performance.

The easy things were done years ago and each subsequent improvement requires more and more creativity.

One thing is certain, the carpet industry will continue its focus on the environment. To stay up-to-date on the industry’s environmental initiatives, programs and progress, visit the CARE website, carpetrecovery.org, as well as CRI’s, carpet-rug.org.

Jeff Carrier is the sustainability and indoor air quality manager of the Carpet & Rug Institute (CRI)