Most people say one person’s trash becomes another person’s treasure. But Mohawk lives by it. As the largest recycler in the flooring industry, our recycling efforts divert three billion pounds of waste from landfills every year.
From plastic bottles and tires, to animal fat and wood, the recycled materials that enter Mohawk facilities are quickly transformed into alternative energy sources, carpet cores, and beautiful flooring. More than 500 Mohawk products–carpet, carpet tiles, laminate, and ceramic tile –contain recycled materials.
While leading recycling efforts across the industry involves a lot of trash, Mohawk’s dedication and commitment to being a green company and offering environmentally friendly flooring products is anything but garbage!
Plastic Bottle Story
Open since 1999, Mohawk operates the world’s largest integrated plastic bottle recycling facility located in Summerville, Georgia. The U.S. recycles 30 percent of its plastic bottles, and Mohawk purchases 25 percent of these, totaling 215 million pounds each year.
Trying to envision this many bottles may be difficult. Consider all of the 20 oz. plastic soda bottles stacked from end to end, each bottle approximately nine inches tall. The resulting height is 6,926 Empire State Buildings stacked from end to end. Now that’s a lot of bottles!
Mohawk recycles these plastic bottles to make polyethylene terephthalate (PET) carpet fiber. A state-of-the-art process sorts the plastic bottles, chops up the plastic into little chips, vigorously cleans the chips and then melts them into polyester resin. The fiber is cut and shipped to Mohawk carpet manufacturing facilities to make carpet sold as part of the Mohawk everSTRAND™ collection. The face fiber of everSTRAND™ carpet is made of 100 percent post-consumer content. And it doesn’t end there. Each part of the plastic bottle is reused. The caps and labels are transformed into other useful products such as plastic carpet cores.
The best plastic bottles for making carpet have a “1” or “PET” symbol on the bottom. So be sure to recycle!
From consumer’s homes, to Summerville, Georgia, Mohawk uses plastic bottles to keep trash out of landfills and create beautiful carpet.
Trash
At Mohawk, the mindset that one man’s waste is another man’s treasure is engrained in everything we do.
With the number of landfills in the United States steadily decreasing, Mohawk constantly looks for ways to reduce, recycle and reuse. Mohawk ships in more trash than we create. We expect to divert more than three billion pounds of waste from landfills during 2007 alone and that amount will only rise in the coming years.
Mohawk converts more than 30 million pounds of tires into door mats each year. Additionally, more than three billion plastic bottles are recycled each year — that’s almost one in four bottles recycled in North America.
The Mohawk Greenworks Center features patent pending technology that can collect and process all types of woven and tufted carpets, made from almost all synthetic fibers and transforms them into usable products. This carpet would normally be thrown away and end up in another landfill, but Mohawk’s commitment to environmental leadership that works helps to find new uses for this would-be trash.
Tires
By reusing hundreds of thousands of old tires, Mohawk is the leading tire recycler in the flooring industry. Since we began using rubber tires in 1999, the amount recycled has picked up steadily. In 2004 we recycled 10 million pounds of crumb rubber tires—the equivalent of 720,000 tires—into designer door mats. Mohawk now converts more than 30 million pounds of tires into door mats each year.
What does tire recycling mean for the environment? Consider the fact that making four new tires requires 2,072 gallons of water and 88 gallons of crude oil. Discarded tires can also produce dangerous, toxic fires in dumps and old tires retain water where disease-spreading insects thrive.
Recycling post-consumer products — items that have been in the marketplace like used tires and plastic bottles — is a very important part of Mohawk’s environmental efforts.