NATIONAL REPORT—Carpeting is certainly one of the most significant considerations when designing a hotel’s interior—from an aesthetic, cost, maintenance, and durability perspective. Fortunately for the lodging industry, and for those who specify or purchase carpet, manufacturers of the floor covering material are making it easier to minimize one’s environmental impact without compromising any aspect of the product. Increasingly, manufacturers are taking a Cradle to Cradle approach to manufacturing—making sure that as few resources as necessary are used during manufacturing, that as much recycled content as possible is included in the carpeting and its backing, and that at the end of its life the carpeting is recycled and not sent to a landfill. (Visit the Carpet America Recovery Effort site to learn about a joint industry-government effort to increase the amount of recycling and reuse of post-consumer carpet and reduce the amount of waste carpet going to landfills.)
To help those specifying and purchasing carpet better understand the “green” aspects of carpeting, there are several systems that have been established: ANSI/NSF 140-2007e Sustainable Carpet Assessment Standard (NSF-140), the Carpet and Rug Institute’s Green Label testing and approval program, and MBDC’s Cradle to Cradle Certification. There is also a multi-attribute standard called SMaRT, which stands for Sustainable Materials Rating Technology. Scientific Certification Systems also certifies carpet products. Outside of the United States, there are even more standards to consider. BRE Environmental Assessment Method, for example, is an independent third party program that evaluates the sustainable attributes of products and services to an international market. The first four systems mentioned above are described below.
ANSI/NSF 140-2007e Sustainable Carpet Assessment Standard (NSF-140) is intended for commercial, hospitality, and similar carpets. There are three levels of achievement: Silver, Gold and Platinum. The Standard evaluates carpet on five key attributes: public health and environment, energy and energy efficiency, bio-based and recycled content, manufacturing, and reclamation and end of life management. Organizations certifying to NSF-140 include NSF International, Scientific Certification Systems, and UL Environment.
In 1992, the Carpet and Rug Institute launched its Green Label testing and approval program, which sets limits for the level of VOC (volatile organic compound) emissions from carpet, adhesives and cushion that can be released into the indoor air. Since then, the program has voluntary raised indoor air quality standards four times by requiring even lower emission levels and increasing the number of compounds studied in the Green Label Plus program.
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry’s (MBDC) Cradle to Cradle Certification is a multi-attribute eco-label that assesses a product’s safety to humans and the environment and design for future life cycles. The program provides guidelines to help businesses implement the Cradle to Cradle framework, which focuses on using safe materials that can be disassembled and recycled as technical nutrients or composted as biological nutrients. Unlike single-attribute eco-labels, MBDC’s certification program takes a comprehensive approach to evaluating the sustainability of a product and the practices employed in manufacturing the product. The materials and manufacturing practices of each product are assessed in five categories: Material Health, Material Reutilization, Renewable Energy Use, Water Stewardship, and Social Responsibility. There are four levels of product certification: Basic, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
SMaRT Sustainable Product Standards follow triple-bottom line practices benefiting environmental, social and economic conditions. They provide substantial global benefits for building products, fabric, apparel, textile and flooring and cover more than 80 percent of the world’s products. A few of the prerequisites to certification include: no toxic Stockholm Treaty Chemicals including dioxins/PVC; ISO Compliant Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to identify supply chain impacts, and social equity indicators.
Resource-intensive Manufacturing
Carpet manufacturing consumes not only a lot of raw materials but also a lot of water and energy. Many companies have made significant progress in reducing their environmental impact, each taking an in-depth look at the life cycle of the products it makes. Milliken & Co., Shaw Hospitality Group, InterfaceFLOR, and The Mohawk Group are four examples and their efforts are summarized below. Many other companies have taken similar steps.
Milliken, which provides carpet tile and broadloom carpet to the lodging industry, calls its green vision Milliken Eco360. The company, whose headquarters is a nationally recognized arboretum, has achieved carbon negative status as part of the Leonardo Academy’s Cleaner and Greener Energy and Emissions program. Milliken captures and offsets more carbon dioxide than it emits. It does so through the trees it plants and nurtures in Milliken forests, the use of alternative fuels, and energy audits. According to Bill Gregory, director of sustainability for Milliken & Co., the company has reduced its energy consumption by more than 50 percent over the last 10 to 12 years. It has a goal of an additional 5 percent reduction every year. A total of 100 million pounds of cardboard packaging has been eliminated to date.
Over the past 15 years, the weight of a Milliken modular carpet product has been reduced by almost 40 percent. Milliken gets 10 percent of its power from its own hydroelectric plants and receives more than 80 percent of the harvested methane from the LaGrange, Ga. landfill. All Milliken plants are ISO 14001 certified. Since 1999, Milliken has sent zero waste to landfills. Seventy percent of the carpet tile Milliken takes from its customers is reused and donated.
“We are using dyeing processes that use dramatically less water—only about 10 percent of the water we have been typically using,” Gregory said.
Shaw Hospitality Group
Shaw Hospitality Group takes a Cradle to cradle approach to the design of its carpeting. This means the carpeting can be deconstructed and recycled back into its original ingredients time and time again. Shaw collects more than 90 million pounds of carpet annually and recycles it through its various recycling programs. The company’s Evergreen Nylon Recycling Facility in Augusta, Ga., accounts for one-third of the industry’s entire carpet recycling capabilities. Shaw has more than 40 recycling collection centers in the United States.
At the Evergreen Nylon Recycling Facility in Augusta, Ga., Shaw converts carpet into new nylon. This eliminates landfill waste and keeps high-value materials within the production stream to make new carpet. Evergreen takes Shaw’s own post-consumer Eco Evolution and Eco Solution Q carpets and other nylon 6 carpets from other manufacturers and converts it into caprolactam monomer, the building block of new nylon. The recycled content can then be inserted back into the production stream for new Shaw nylon.
Through manufacturing approaches such as Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing, Shaw has committed to significant improvements within its facilities including: energy intensity reduction by 25 percent by 2017; waste to landfill reduction by 90 percent by 2011; and water intensity reduction by 40 percent by 2016.
A recently announced Shaw plant will reclaim carpet and carpet waste and convert it into energy. To be completed by the end of this year, it is expected to convert more than 76 million pounds annually of reclaimed carpet into steam and energy for the manufacturing site. Using post-consumer carpet as an energy source is one of Shaw’s strategies to reduce its use of petroleum-based energy while increasing the company’s use of alternative energy sources. At Shaw Plants 11, 14, and 16, the company is working toward switching over from natural gas to yellow grease collected from restaurants.
Desiree Perkins, Shaw Hospitality Group’s vice president of marketing, says every major brand has shown interest in Shaw’s Eco Evolution and Eco Solution Q lines of carpeting.
“We’ve been very fortunate in that we were able to develop product that meets the market pricing that is needed,” Perkins says. “You don’t have to pay more or give up design to select a responsible product.”
InterfaceFLOR’s Mission Zero
InterfaceFLOR has a goal of reducing its environmental footprint to zero by 2020. The program, called Mission Zero, aims to eliminate, not just reduce, all forms of waste from InterfaceFLOR’s facilities. The company defines waste as any cost that doesn’t produce value to its customers, including traditional forms of waste like scrap or material sent to landfills, as well as the resources, time and energy wasted by anything the company does not do right the first time. Since 1994, cumulative savings from waste elimination activities have totaled more than $107 million and waste cost per unit of production has been reduced by 48 percent.
InterfaceFLOR is known for its carpet tiles that can easily be replaced or recycled when worn. An entire carpet does not need to be replaced. These install with less than 4 percent waste, versus 13.1 percent for broadloom. As part of InterfaceFLOR’s Cool Carpet program, customers can purchase climate neutral carpet, meaning that the greenhouse gases emitted during the product’s life cycle has been balanced by investments in emissions offsets.
InterfaceFLOR has partnered with the City of Lagrange, Ga., to convert methane gas from the local landfill into a green energy source. Through ReEntry 2.0 and a partnership with its fiber suppliers, the company recycles type 6,6 nylon into new type 6,6 nylon. InterfaceFLOR’s GlasBac backing (pre-consumer/post-industrial and post-consumer) and similar competitor backings are recycled through its Cool Blue backing technology. GlasBac RE products contain an average of 55 percent total recycled content with a minimum of 18 percent post-consumer recycled content. GlasBac products produced in LaGrange, Ga., contain an average of 40 percent post-industrial recycled content. The company takes back all carpet—broadloom and carpet tile—regardless of fiber or backing type.
The Mohawk Group’s greenworks
The Mohawk Group’s environmental program is called greenworks. The company makes its carpeting using everything from carpet waste to bottle glass to plastic beverage bottles. As one of the world’s largest recyclers of plastic bottles, the company takes approximately 25 percent of all the plastic beverage and food bottles collected in North America and recycles them into carpet fibers. This diverts an enormous amount of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic from landfills. Bottle caps and labels become plastic carpet cores that can be used over and over again—unlike cardboard cores which are typically thrown away after one use. The company is now using carpet fibers made from the starch in corn kernels and is using soy oil to make backing systems.
The Mohawk Group recycles other companies’ waste streams such as Celceram, a byproduct of coal combustion in electric utility plants, to use in its backing systems. The company will pick up any and every kind of carpet—even carpet that it has not made—as part of its ReCover program. The company has reduced its dependence on petroleum by 10 million pounds annually by converting to bio-based renewable materials. Like many of its competitors, The Mohawk Group is drastically reducing the number of actual carpet samples sent out to its customers by offering high definition, digital simulations instead. Every simulated carpet sample saves a whole quart of oil and decreases the amount of carpet that ends up in landfills. The company’s water reduce/reuse efforts have cut the amount of water it uses by 50 percent since 1995.
In summary, when reviewing how to purchase sustainable carpeting, consider the following: its certification (look for third party certification by a reputable organization—see above); whether its maker is a participant in the Carpet America Recovery Effort; the resources consumed during manufacturing (“You can’t make a green product in a brown factory,” Milliken’s Bill Gregory says); the percentage of recycled content in the carpet fiber and its backing; the chemistry of the product and its impact on public health; whether or not the carpeting and its backing can easily be recycled (favor nylon 6, nylon 6,6 or natural fibers); whether public documents are available that detail the manufacturer’s environmental impacts; and whether or not the company you are buying from will take back the carpeting for recycling after its useful life. Also, those pursuing LEED certification for their hotel projects should ask their suppliers which of their products qualify for LEED points.
Glenn Hasek can be reached at editor@greenlodgingnews.com.
