Dalton, Ga.-based Carpet America
Recovery EffortSM (CARE) recently received a donation of carbon dioxide (CO2) credits from
Spartanburg-based Milliken & Company to offset the environmental impacts of CARE’s Fourth
Annual Conference, held recently at Southern Pine Conference Center at Callaway Gardens, Ga.
CARE is a voluntary initiative supported by US carpet manufacturers and related businesses
to reduce carpet waste sent to landfills. Milliken, whose Milliken Floor Covering division has sent
no carpet manufacturing waste to landfills since 1999, maintains forests and small hydroelectric
plants that absorb and reduce CO2 emissions totaling approximately 900 million pounds per year.
“Our managed forests sequester much more carbon dioxide than our factories produce,” said
Russell Grizzle, global president, Milliken Floor Covering. “Donating credits to reduce the
industry’s impact on landfills fits with our philosophy of respect to the Earth.”
At the conference, CARE released its Fourth Annual Report and announced that respondents to
its annual survey reported diverting 224.6 million pounds of carpet from landfills in 2005,
including 194.3 million pounds that were recycled — 97 percent more than were recycled in 2004.
Since 2002, when CARE began collecting statistics, 483.7 million pounds of carpet have been
diverted from landfills, based on survey results.
“Aside from the known amount we have reported in 2005, we now see a path to demand in 2007
that adds an additional need for more than 400 million pounds of old carpet,” said Robert Peoples,
Ph.D., executive director, CARE. “I am forecasting another increase of greater than 100 percent for
2006, which would reinforce our belief that this new industry of carpet landfill diversion is well
on its way to meet our overall goals.”
CARE also honored Winchester, Ky.-based Champion Polymer Recycling, a division of Old
Saybrook, Conn.-based Infiltrator Systems Inc., as Recycler of the Year; and Ronald Greitzer,
president of Vernon, Calif.-based Los Angeles Fiber Co., as Person of the Year.
Champion has implemented a polypropylene carpet recovery system to provide raw materials for
Infiltrator Systems’ leachfield chamber systems.
Greitzer has been an active recycler since 1983, when he and Stan Greitzer founded Los
Angeles Fiber for the recycling of carpet and textile materials. The company, which was named CARE’s
Recycler of the Year in 2003, is the world’s largest recycler of post-consumer carpet, according
to CARE.
May 30, 2006
