Carpet Recycling Sees Measured Progress

The Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) was created in 2002 to help the industry meet the carpet recycling and reuse goals set forth by the Memorandum of Understanding for Carpet Stewardship (MOU), a voluntary agreement signed by members of the carpet industry, government entities, and nongovernmental organizations. How successful is CARE? The organization announced survey results in May 2006 showing 225 million pounds (102 million kg) of post-consumer carpet diverted from landfills in 2005, or 4.5% of the five billion pounds (2.3 billion kg) of discards. The results are an increase of 108% from 2004 but still represent less than half of the MOU goal for 2006 of 528 million pounds diverted.

CARE’s executive director, Bob Peoples, forecasts another 100% increase in carpet recycling for 2006, but CARE’s survey showed that manufacturers want more market development for post-consumer carpet. One manufacturer, Tandus Group, Inc., recently walked out on CARE, saying that it’s not doing enough to help develop federal procurement guidelines for carpet containing post-consumer carpet. “Because a large part of the industry cannot meet those guidelines, they have actively opposed them,” Dobbin Callahan, general manager of government markets for Tandus, told