Carpet recycling starts right after production

This means:

• At the factory, yarn waste is recuperated on-site and re-used to make new raw materials.
• After usage, the collection and recycling of scrapped carpet are major issues.

Over the past few years, the carpet industry has developed a four-steps recycling project, with GUT acting as a coordinator:

4 major steps:

1. Designing a recycling system for carpet
2. Developing the technology and the tools
3. Pilot plant: economic, technological and environmental evaluation
4. Using the know how

Designing a recycling system: the RECAM project

The RECAM-project, funded by the European Community, aimed at developing an economically feasible, closed-loop system for post consumer and industrial carpet waste. It studied the collection, identification and sorting as well as the recovery of high-grade materials and energy from residual fractions. This project was completed in 1999.

Developing the technology

When RECAM was successfully completed we needed to find out whether the right technological equipment and tools were available or could be developed.

One of them was COCARE, a coding system for easy carpet identification. Its goal: the simplification of recycling for textile floor coverings through the development of a standardised European code for textile floor coverings and the creation of the necessary technical prerequisites. A code is applied to the back of the carpet during production while at the same time the data relevant to recycling is stored in a database. The stored data is collected centrally and forwarded to the recycler.

Pilot plant: Carpet Recycling Europe (CRE)

Carpet Recycling Europe was founded in 1998 as a pilot project, with the goal to implement the results obtained from RECAM. This project was financially supported by the carpet industry with the intention to develop collection and sorting systems for carpet waste in companies, at retailers' facilities and close to consumers.

CRE established the first automated sorting plant for carpet in Mainz to gather the data needed for the economic, technical and ecological evaluation of carpet recycling. After optimisation of its processes, the CRE plant was able to sort up to 3.5 tons of discarded carpet per hour into different mono-fractions.

CRE had also demonstrated that the current economic conditions are unfavourable to recycling, since it is still possible and cheaper to dump carpet in landfills. As a result, carpet recycling cannot be economically implemented today, unless political and economic conditions change. For this reason it was decided to close the pilot plant in August 2002.

Economic conditions will probably be more favourable to carpet recycling when new EU legislation comes into effect in 2004-2005. Then, carpet waste containing more than 95% organic materials will have to be pre-treated.

Using the know-how

With the experiences from the work of Carpet Recycling Europe the European carpet industry acquired considerable know-how, which will be of large use during the accomplishment of new challenges and in co-operation with the European authorities and the disposal industry.