What happens to old carpets?
Going into some of the easily available statistics is a sobering activity. Even if not all I could dig out in the way of figures might be entirely accurate, I was first hit by the worst I could imagine: In the US, 89% of carpet ends up in the landfill, 6% is incinerated and less than 5% recycled. That's 5 billion pounds into the landfill, every year, 1-2% of the total (reflect on the total). If we are going to share the blame, it works out at 17 pounds per inhabitant per year. At that point I didn't have the stomach to investigate the global figures.
What about turning carpets into fuel? Can be done, of course, even though carpet is usually made up of several ingredients. Not as dirty as coal, more than natural gas, apparently, and probably an expensive process to set up. To me that is another example of ingenuity employed by the capitalist machine when the whole problem could be avoided in the first place at the manufacture stage.
Manufacture from recycled materials? Sure - plastic bottles, what is euphemistically called "Industrial scraps" all that good stuff (again, which shouldn't be around in the first place) Make old carpet into something else equally unfriendly by giving it at least a new lease of life ? I read "acoustic materials" and "plastic resin for industry" It's never easy to find out the total costs of conversion in reality, even if you go that way. I'm sure there are a lot more products - I'm just beginning to survey the scene. So, I would guess, are the recyclers, if that 89% to the landfill still holds.
So it turns out that carpet is another really quite important case of the same old story. There is already a gargantuan amount of the stuff lying around the planet, which will not go away for a long time - for example, it takes around 40 years for nylon to decompose in favorable conditions., and other parts of it including the glues used (mostly nasty stuff) will lurk a lot longer. We need to address the mess, however slowly, and perhaps it would make us feel better if we worked fast.
So I call us back to the origin of the problem, making it in the first place. Can we make it out of environmentally more friendly materials ? Sisal, seagrass, coir, cotton, jute, organic wool, bamboo? All in a list of what folks make carpet of now. But much of it is small scale, expensive and for the elite markets. The same tools of research encouragement, regulation and taxation could easily ensure that within a very short time we could avoid the ten-year extra 50 billion tons going into our landfills, wherever we might be able to put them by then. The basic mechanisms of the capitalism won't cut it. What should we do?
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