KB Homes Specifies Recycled Carpet Fiber in Every New Home

Sustainable Life Media

The EPA estimates that fully 2% of annual solid waste is carpet and as a petroleum based product, new nylon carpet is inherently not sustainable and will probably become more expensive as the raw resource becomes scarce. But all new homes built by KB Homes will have nylon carpet installed which incorporates some recycled nylon carpet content. Could nylon be a cradle to cradle material?

When recycled, nylon carpet is more often turned into plastic lumber or railroad ties than remade into carpet again, but Shaw’s Anso® carpet is processed in a new plant which breaks post-consumer carpet down to the building block for nylon 6 and their new carpet uses a percentage of this material. This processing opens the door to potentially making continuously recyclable nylon carpet and Shaw is working toward such a cradle-to-cradle system. Shaw now collects up to 300 million pounds of post-consumer carpet per year.

Major carpet players have been working on redesigning carpet recovery systems for more than ten years. Mowak, for example, accepts any carpet (not just Mohawk products) for recycling. Listen to a brief interview with Mohawk’s director of sustainable strategies. Shaw, Mohawk, and Interface are also partners in the Carpet America Recovery Effort which is self-described as “Finding Market Driven Solutions to Divert Port-Consumer Carpet from Landfills.” If they successfully recycle 25 percent of discarded carpet by 2012, it would divert something like 1.7 billion pounds of carpet which is now discarded annually.