Go Green

It's a simple and effective approach to everything we do! From discarded plastic bottles and old tires to animal fat and wood, the recycled materials that enter Mohawk facilities are quickly transformed into alternative energy sources, carpet cores, and beautiful flooring.

Mohawk diverts three billion pounds of waste from landfills every year. To reduce new landfill content, we constantly seek new ways to reuse and recycle process waste. More than 500 Mohawk products—including residential and commercial carpet, carpet tiles, cushion, laminate, and ceramic tile—contain recycled materials. We strive to maximize the amount of recycled or renewable content in all products and are committed to developing processes that will make recycling products easier for customers as well.

Plastic Bottle Story
To envision the number of bottles we recycle annually, imagine millions of 20-oz. plastic soda bottles—each bottle about nine inches tall—stacked end to end until the height is approximately the same as 6,926 Empire State Buildings piled on top of each other. That’s a lot of bottles! When recycled, they can be converted into polyethylene terephthalate (PET) carpet fiber.

Our state-of-the-art process sorts the plastic bottles, chops up the plastic into little chips, vigorously cleans the chips and then melts them into polyester resin. The fiber is cut and shipped to Mohawk carpet manufacturing facilities to make carpet sold as part of the Mohawk EverStrand collection. The face fiber of EverStrand carpet is made of 100 percent post–consumer content. The best plastic bottles for making carpet have a “1” or “PET” symbol on the bottom. Every time you recycle these bottles, you’re helping us make beautiful carpet AND a beautiful world.

Additional Recycling Efforts
At Mohawk, the adage that one man’s waste is another man’s treasure helps shape everything we do. Mohawk constantly looks for innovative ways to reduce, recycle and reuse. With the number of available landfills in the United States steadily decreasing, Mohawk minimizes new landfill content by diverting billions of pounds of waste from landfills every year. We actually ship in more trash than we create.

Mohawk began reusing hundreds of thousands of used rubber tires in 1999 and turning them into designer door mats. Since then, the amount has picked up steadily and Mohawk has become the leading tire recycler in the flooring industry, converting millions of pounds of tires into welcome mats each year.

Tire recycling does more than just beautify the environment. Besides being unsightly, old tires are unhealthy: they collect and retain stagnant water where disease–spreading insects thrive. Discarded tires can also produce dangerous toxic fires in dumps. Recycling post–consumer products—items like tires and plastic bottles that have been in the marketplace—is a very important part of Mohawk’s environmental efforts.