Thirsty Consumer

A NEW FABRIC. Summerville, Ga., has been the home of PET recycling facilities for decades and served as the headquarters for the former Image Carpets, which was founded in 1976.

According to Phil Cavin, who has been with Image Carpets since 1987, that company opened its recycled plastic-to-carpet fibers plant in 1989, originally requiring clean recycled PET flake as feedstock.

"We were primarily a polyester carpet company and we had been buying our fiber from a lot of different sources when, in 1988, we decided to take a very big risk and decided to make our own fibers out of recycled PET chips," says Cavin.

Partly because sourcing sufficient amounts of clean R-PET flake became difficult, the company developed a wash line in the early 1990s. "That allowed us to buy dirty flake," says Cavin.

Buying dirty flake was a good move for Image, but not without problems, says Roland Jones, technical procurement director for Mohawk Industries. "We had to trust other people to do our sorting and grinding for us, and most of these suppliers were not equipped or trained to deal with the PVC issue," Jones says.

He says the company "decided to integrate backwards a little bit more a couple of years later when we decided to install a grinding operation that would allow us to buy bales."

Once the facility had developed a grinding, sorting and washing system that it judged to be satisfactory, it quickly expanded its operations.

"By 1994 or so, we were pretty much buying 100 percent bales and really became instrumental in using recycled PET bottles to make carpet products," says Cavin.

Jones says in the early 1990s, bales of PET were quite a challenge to deal with. He says, "Not only were the bales full of things other than PET bottles, you had to deal with basecups and aluminum caps with PVC liners, and PVC bottles were much more prevalent."

While Jones says many of the early problems with baled PET bottles have been addressed, today there are new, more technically challenging problems that Mohawk must confront in order to successfully process bales of recycled PET bottles and containers.

Cavin says the challenge of using recycled PET flakes is that "polyester is difficult to dye" during the carpet coloring process. "The bad news is that it can be tough to work with in that stage; the good news is those same qualities make for a stain-resistant end product," he comments. "So that was kind of our niche as Image Carpet—a recycled-content product with great stain resistance."

The company’s success in this niche caught the attention of the larger manufacturer Mohawk Industries, which purchased Image Carpets in 1999.

"Since that time, Mohawk has taken the ball and run with it," says Cavin, who is now national procurement director with Mohawk, working out of the Summerville plant.

Although Mohawk draws little attention to the recycling aspect of its operations on its Web site or in its promotional materials, the company is quietly one of the foremost consumers of PET bottles year after year.

The practice fits into a corporate environmental policy statement that reads in part, "Mohawk’s strong focus on reducing, recycling and reuse have made us an industry leader."

SPINNING A TALE. The Summerville plant produces a variety of materials on several production lines, with carpet fibers being the lead product and cushion and pillow fill also made from the stream of post-consumer PET bottles.

The company purchases bales of commingled clear and green PET to produce both natural and green threads or cushion material. The plant, located in northwest Georgia, not far from the Alabama border, contains the grinding, sorting and extrusion lines that, combined, produce all of the recycled polyester fiber Mohawk uses.

The company’s manufacturing process begins by breaking the bales apart with large trommels. The bottles then ride on conveyors that pass by manual sorters who remove obvious unwanted items, such as metal and aluminum cans, dark-colored plastics and other non-PET bottles that have made it into the bales. The bottles then travel through electronic devices that can tell the difference between PET and PVC, after which air jets remove the PVC bottles from the conveyors, ejecting them into a separate area. The PET bottles are then automatically separated by color just before they are ground in to flakes.

The PET flakes are washed and dried before passing through additional equipment that removes flakes of metal and aluminum cans that were missed during the initial sortation.

The clean PET flake is then processed through extruders that melt the plastic and force it through dies called spinnerets to forms the fibers. The fibers are drawn, crimped, heat set and then baled. The fiber bales are then transported to the next step in the carpet making operation and will eventually become Mohawk finished carpet or fiberfill for home furnishings.

In Summerville, Mohawk successfully converts enormous numbers of bales of post-consumer No. 1 PET bottles compressed by recyclers into a saleable end product.

NUMBER ONE. When it comes to recycling No. 1 PET plastic bottles, Mohawk’s Summerville plant has a good grip on being the No. 1 consumer of the commodity in the United States.

"We buy about 215 million pounds per year of recycled bottles from all over the country, and even bring some in from Mexico and Canada," says Cavin.

All of those bottles eventually produce some 145 million pounds of carpet and 20 million pounds of fiberfill, accounting for 85 percent of all the polyester fiber produced domestically by Mohawk Industries. All fibers produced in Summerville are made from recycled material.

(Although it takes 215 million pounds of material to produce that 165 million pounds of carpet and fiber fill, many of those "lost" pounds are also recycled elsewhere, thanks to the sorting process at the Summerville plant.)

The 215 million pounds of PET Mohawk consumes annually make it the largest single corporate consumer of No. 1 PET bottles in the country and possibly in the world.

According to Cavin, around 1.1 billion pounds of recycled PET were collected in the United States in 2005. In the last four years, the amount collected has barely kept up with demand.

"We’ve been in a supply and demand crunch in the last four years or so," says Cavin. "Asia is buying about 350 million pounds annually now—close to about one-third of what is baled here in the U.S. They are our largest competitor for material."

Cavin says there are many issues to consider concerning the future of No. 1 PET bottle supply and demand. "Supposedly, China has virgin resin capacity coming online soon, so in another six to 12 months, demand from there could slow," he remarks. "But if you talk to five different people about the export market, you’ll get five different answers about it," Cavin adds.

SUPPLY SIDE. For Mohawk, concerns are not chiefly on the viability of its process or demand for its fabric, but rather on the collection and supply of No. 1 bottles. "The scales are even now, and actually there are companies that would like to add capacity to use more recycled PET, but they are afraid to do so because there is such a bottle shortage," says Cavin.