In its 12th year, the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) overcame challenging hurdles which included the organization’s first formal audits; the loss of two major processors in California; the rapid escalation of polyester (PET) carpet in the marketplace recycle stream, and the resulting request by the collector/sorter entrepreneur community for help from the mills.
Despite all these challenges the carpet industry still managed to divert a record amount of product from going to the landfill in 2013—534 million pounds, or 14% of the 3.7 billion pounds of total discarded carpet. This is a 52% increase in the U.S. gross post-consumer carpet (PCC) collections from 2012 to 2013. Since CARE’s founding in 2002, this means more than 3.2 billion pounds of PCC have been diverted from landfills in the U.S.