When the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) was created in 2002, the concept of diverting carpet from landfills for the purpose of recycling it back into itself or finding other afterlife solutions was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking.
Back then, as Bob Peoples, the association’s executive director, points out, “there was no such industry or business model in place for such an endeavor. When CARE was started nothing was going back to carpet, now 25% [of what’s being diverted from landfills] is. That’s awesome when you consider we started from zero.”