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The Carpet Wars

Breaking down what the big players (InterfaceFLOR, Milliken, Mohawk, Shaw, and Tandus) are doing right.

Penny Bonda -- Interior Design, 8/24/2006 10:47:00 AM

Ahhhh – the carpet wars! In no other product category has the competition for your attention been as spirited as in the commercial carpet industry. Manufacturers try to convince you, the specifier or purchaser, that its products are perfect for your job in all the ways we traditionally evaluate materials—aesthetics, cost, durability, appropriateness and so on. But the landscape changed a decade or so ago when sustainability became part of the attribute mix.

I believe it all began when the founder and CEO of Interface, Ray Anderson, set out to make his to make his flooring division environmentally sustainable. What has followed is nothing less than remarkable. Not only has Interface made enormous strides toward reaching the top of "Mount Sustainability," as Anderson characterizes his journey, but many of his competitors in the commercial carpet industry have followed suit. No other product segment has made environmental progress as quickly as this one.

That’s good news, almost any way you look at it. The life-cycle impacts of the production, use, and disposal of carpets have lessened across the board, but there is a downside. The designer, trying to sort out the conflicting claims proffered by the manufacturers, is likely to find more confusion than clarity as the contradictions quickly become obvious. Selecting products for specification or purchase has always been challenging even for those who have been doing so for a long time. Add in criteria about which the designer has little knowledge or experience, such as fiber attributes, manufacturing processes, recycling procedures, etc. and the task becomes daunting.

In an effort to demystify things, I put the following question to five of the leading commercial carpet manufacturers: What does your product/company offer that’s unique or so much better than your competitor's? What I discovered is that the direct company-to-company comparisons I was hoping to find are not really appropriate, either because of some rather circuitous responses, or—and I far prefer this interpretation—because each manufacturer has determined its strategy and is doggedly pursuing its goal to bring to market the best damn green carpet it can.

Each of the queried manufacturers is rightly proud of their products and programs and I’d be remiss in not bringing the highlights to your attention, in alphabetical order, of course, and with apologies to others in the industry that are also doing good work.

InterfaceFLOR
• GlasBacRE is a 100% recycled backing product that is manufactured using "Cool Blue" to increase its ability to keep reclaimed and waste carpet in the technical loop. Cool Blue opens the company to exploring other plastics and polymers as inputs, with the ultimate potential of diverting more than 20 million pounds of plastics from the landfill every year. Feedstock for "Cool Blue" is generated via ReEntry, the company’s recycling program that has reclaimed over 90 million pounds of used carpet tile since its inception. • Two InterfaceFLOR products were inspired by biomimicry – designing products as nature would. Entropy is based on random tile installation that provides for little to no waste. TacTiles, 3 x 3 inch adhesive squares made from a chemically inert (PET) polymer—the same polymer used to make soda bottles, are used to adjoin carpet tiles to each other and reduce the environmental footprint over traditional adhesives by over 90 percent. • Cool Carpet, which is standard on some products and available as an upgrade on others, is an investment in offsetting all of the greenhouse gases associated with the manufacture, delivery and installation of an InterfaceFLOR product. Milliken
• The Earth Square program, a five-step process that begins when old carpet squares are returned to Milliken, super-cleaned, retextured, redesigned and colored and then reinstalled either in the same location or another, assures that all its modular tiles can remain 100% post-consumer recycled at about half the cost of new carpeting. • Milliken introduced PVC free carpet in 1986 ahead of the industry, removing more than 800 million pounds of PVC from production and ultimately from landfills. Its ES backing system contains up to 35% recycled content. • Milliken harvests 80% of methane from local landfill to replace 30% of natural gas needs, offers its No Carpet to Landfill Pledge to customers with end of life options to re-use, or renew through donation and recycling and has maintained zero waste to landfill since 1999. Mohawk
• ReCover is a nationwide network of carpet recyclers who are able to recycle any type of carpet regardless of yardage, yarn, backing or manufacturer. The customer-friendly program is initiated with just one phone call to The Mohawk Group. The program participates in Carpet America Recovery Effort (C.A.R.E.), an industry-wide and government initiative dedicated to the recycling and reuse of post-consumer carpet. • Encycle, Mohawk’s new extruded carpet tile line, allows for better material application rates over traditional carpet tile lines, and uses 28% less material and is 100% PVC-free. More details will be available in early fall. • Lees Carpets, one of The Mohawk Group’s brands, offers Unibond and Unibond RE backing systems, which are certified by Scientific Certification Systems to contain a minimum of 20% post-consumer recycled content, by total product weight. Shaw
• Shaw embarked on a cradle-to-cradle redesign of its products and processes, making continuous improvements with over $100 million in direct environmental technology investment as of today. The transitional investments include a new waste-to energy gasification facility that will gasify carpet waste and wood waste (total 22,000 tons per year). It lowers fossil fuel use, improves emissions to the same profile as natural gas, and it helps to lower the cost of Shaw's Evergreen post-consumer carpet collection system. • The Evergreen recycling program, which will open in the first half of 2007, completes the cradle to cradle promise of EcoWorx, especially with the EcoWorx broadloom introduction. Part of the Evergreen output will go into the residential builder market. This is the first major residential program for recycled material. • Shaw exited PVC at the end of 2004 with its introduction of the EcoWorx polyolefin carpet tile backing and will expand later this year to include broadloom. Both will be fully recyclable. Tandus
• C&A Floorcoverings, one of the commercial floor covering brands united by Tandus, offers an alternative backing called ethos, a non-chlorinated, high-performance vinyl backing for commercial carpet. Containing 76% post-consumer recycled content, ethos is made from the polyvinyl butyral (PVB) film recovered when automotive laminated safety glass is recycled. • In 1996, C&A was the first company to introduce a commercially available, fully operational, carpet-to-carpet recycling program, recovering and recycling its and competitors’ vinyl-backed carpets into the ER3 backing system for new carpets. In 1997, C&A discontinued the manufacture of virgin carpet tiles and converted its entire tile product line to recycled content, with a minimum of 31% recycled content. FLOORE, a reclamation and recycling program encourages its customers to recycle their vinyl-backed carpet through its closed-loop recycling process. • C&A is replacing diesel fuel used in its commercial boilers with biodiesel, a renewable energy source in order to reduce emissions and dependence on foreign oil. So there you have it—five carpet manufacturers doing a world of good – literally. Yes, they are keeping an eye on each other, but I’ve concluded exactly what I knew at the beginning of this exercise: the leading commercial carpet manufacturers have been scrambling, for years now, to capture your attention through their environmental successes and initiatives and, as a result, our choices are better than they have ever been—but not as good as they’re going to get!