Carpet recycling reaches a milestone

From Waste & Recycling News, a great story about a CARE carpet recycling milestone:

Milestones abound for the Carpet America Recovery Effort(CARE), which recently reported that in 2010 its members surpassed the 2 billion pound mark for carpet diverted from landfills. That´s a cumulative figure since the organization´s founding in 2002.

In 2010, CARE members diverted 338 million pounds of carpet from landfills -- an increase of 9% over 2009. And of that carpet, more than 271 million pounds were recycled back into carpet and other consumer products, according to CARE´s recently released annual report.

Under CARE´s leadership, carpet recycling in the U.S. has increased by 490%.

Great recycling news on the CRI blog

Here's some good news about carpet recycling from the wonderful CRI blog:

It seems that lately, I am hearing more and more about carpet recycling and landfill diversion(even for me – and I hear about it a lot). From Ford Motor Company making cylinder head covers for some of their engines out of nylon recovered from carpet, (see Ford Puts Recycled Carpet 'Under the Hood') to the items I mention later in this blog post, carpet recycling is in the news.

Revved Up Recycling – Ford Puts Carpet Under the Hood

From the always excellent Carpet And Rug Institute Blog, a wonderful story about a new use for our recycled carpet:

Revved Up Recycling – Ford Puts Carpet Under the Hood, So to Speak One growing use for the nylon recovered from post-consumer carpet is to reprocess it back into nylon resins for the plastics industry. The Ford Motor Company announced recently that it is using an engineered resin made out of 100% recycled nylon from post-consumer carpets to make the cylinder head covers on its Ford Escape, Fusion, Mustang and F-150 model vehicles. This is not the first time an automobile manufacturer has used resins derived from post-consumer carpet to make molded plastic parts for under the hood, but this latest announcement gained a lot of attention. And why not? According to Ford, it saved 430,000 gallons of oil by recycling old carpet into these new materials – that’s enough carpet diverted from landfills to carpet 154 football fields. According to a press release from Ford, the recycled nylon resin is called EcoLon, and it is produced byWellman Engineering Resins, an American-owned and operated company based in South Carolina. Read the story that ran in USA Today. It's titledFord recycles enough old carpet to cover 154 gridirons.

Guest Interview on Salone del Mobile, Milan from Materialista

The wonderful Materialista has a great interview with Nancy Jackson about Milan's Design Week up:

As president of Architectural Systems, Nancy Jackson has been an innovator of material trends, sourcing the latest and greatest products from around the world for over 20 years. Dedicated to partnering with the design community, ASI is attuned to what designers are looking for and is always staying ahead of the curve. This month, Nancy attended Salone Internazionale del Mobile, which is the center of creativity and innovation, and I interviewed her to find out first hand what's happening from Milan!

Climate Progress: Big Oil has their Cake and eats your tax dollars, too

Seriously important info here, from a Climate Progress repost of a Seth Hanlon article on tax subsidies we give oil companies:

CAP’s Seth Hanlon explains in this repost why Big Oil companies don’t need $70 billion in tax subsidies (over the next decade) at a time of record profits and prices double what they were when Bush made his remarks.

The five largest oil companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell—last week announced first-quarter profits of $32 billion, up 30 percent from the first quarter of 2010. Exxon Mobil Corp. alone reported quarterly earnings of $11 billion, nearly 70 percent higher than a year ago.

At a time when gas prices exceed $4 a gallon, these profits are coming out of ordinary people’s pockets, and not just at the pump. American families are also padding the oil companies’ enormous profits with their tax dollars. In effect, U.S. taxpayers wrote a collective $7 billion bonus check to the oil industry when they filed their taxes last month.

That’s because the tax code is stuffed with a host of subsidies for oil and gas. These subsidies are delivered through the tax code but they are essentially no different from government spending programs that provide money directly.

Some of these tax earmarks have been around for nearly a century, and the deep-pocketed industry has successfully challenged previous repeal attempts. But today’s high gas prices and inflated profits have undermined the industry’s argument that their tax breaks benefit consumers. Meanwhile, federal budget deficits have sharpened Congress’s focus on eliminating wasteful government spending—of which oil subsidies are one of the worst examples.

Specifying Carpet For Schools: Patterns, Backing Materials, Adhesives

From the CRI blog, a great article on specifying carpets for schools:

Specifying Carpet For Schools: Patterns, Backing Materials, Adhesives

For All the Right Reasons, Carpet is a Great Choice for Schools - Part 3

~ Advice for architects, specifiers and builders on using color and pattern and choosing the right backing material when specifying carpet for schools. Plus, information about the new generation of pre-applied adhesives.