There are many different types of carpet that are made from a variety of materials. In order to create the highest quality products from your old carpet, it must be kept clean and dry and then aggregated with carpet of the same type.

Container

The first stage is the collection of the carpet. Your installer may bring it to the recycling center, or it may go to an intermediate collection container at a retailer's facility.

Determining fiber composition

When it comes to the recycling center it is inspected to ensure that it meets the criteria for recycling. The materials that it is made of are then identified using a special light spectrometer device. The carpet is sorted based on fiber type then packaged for shipment to the different producers who will further process it.

In many cases, it goes through a chemical process to make brand new carpet. This is a sustainable cradle-to-cradle process that may be repeated indefinitely.

Sometimes carpet is downcycled into other related products like backing for carpet tiles or fiber underlay pad that goes under carpet.

Some of the other things the post consumer carpet may become are plastic parts for cars, reusable hay for sediment control on construction sites, sewage pipes, or concrete reinforcement.

Carpet could be transported more than 40,000 miles by truck (1.6 times around the globe) before losing the environmental benefit of recycling.  When there is no viable recycling market for a particular type of carpet, it still can be diverted from the landfill by using it as a substitute for coal (30% higher BTUs than coal) in industrial boilers.  Combusting scrap carpet in place of coal reduces GHG emissions by 3,800 pounds eCO2 versus coal.