From Bottle to Beautiful – How Carpet Becomes Sustainable

Every year in the United States, around 50 BILLION bottles of water are sold.  But where do all those bottles go when we are done with them?

Unfortunately, although most water bottles are made of easily recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (commonly referred to as PET), landfills are still the biggest recipients of our empties.  In fact, only 27 percent of them ever make it to recycling centers.  Which is a real shame considering the beautiful things that can be made from recycled PET.

Take for instance carpeting.

Comfortable, quiet, easy to install, and inexpensive compared to most other types of flooring, carpet is always in demand.  In fact, over 2 billion square yards are produced annually here in the States.  And although some of that carpeting is produced using natural fibers such as wool and jute, the vast majority are made of petrochemical synthetics like nylon, polypropylene or polyester, and that means we need oil.  Lots and lots of oil.  Not the most sustainable raw material, is it?

So what if you could take all those discarded plastic water bottles we no longer need, and turn them into something we truly do need?  Well, that’s just what some innovative carpet companies are starting to do.

When you throw a PET bottle into your recycling bin, it will eventually make it’s way through a process of sorting, cleaning and “chipping”.  The material can then be processed into new polyester fibers, which in turn are gathered and twisted into yarn for carpet.  And all this innovation doesn’t necessarily make the finished product any more expensive!

So, we’ve tackled finding a new source for carpet fiber, but aren’t we just delaying PET’s arrival at the landfill by turning it into something that needs to be discarded again in another 10 to 15 years?

Thankfully, carpet companies are starting to address this issue as well, by creating programs to take back their old carpet and turning it into new product – a process known as “closed loop recycling”.   The best part is that these companies will usually come out and collect the carpet at the job site itself.  Imagine how much waste could be diverted from landfills if all our old, unwanted items were handled that way!

So, when someone hands you a bottle of water, make sure you drop it in the recycling bin when you’re done.  You never know what beautiful things might result

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 7:02 am and is filed under The Green Revolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.