The owners of a brand-new house in 2000 were very likely to have been replacing the carpet 10 years later. Assuming that their house was the average size for a new one that year — 2,266 square feet — and that all the worn carpeting was replaced, they removed about 146 square yards. That’s a lot of carpet, but it’s minuscule compared to the total amount coming from all the households, businesses and institutions that replaced carpet that year.
In 2010, the total amount of carpet that was removed from all types of buildings was about 833 million square yards, or, as the recycled carpet industry calculates it, about 3.5 billion pounds, said Georgina Sikorski, executive director of Carpet America Recovery Effort.
To make these very large numbers less abstract, imagine the worn carpet in units of the fully loaded, long-haul trailers used to carry freight on the nation’s interstate highways.
If all the worn carpet removed from buildings in 2010 were placed in fully loaded, 53-foot long-haul trailers, and all the trailers plus cabins were lined end to end, the line of trucks would have been about 1,238 miles long!
Where does this cargo of worn-out carpets go? Most of it ends up in a landfill. Of the total discarded in 2010, only 9.6 percent was diverted and only 7.7 percent was actually recycled, Sikorski said.
Source: Herald-Tribune