Companies are looking to landfills to make their products more “green” by using recycled materials that would otherwise end up wasted. Trucks overflowing with plastics, glass or rubber bring the products to companies instead of dumps. (Ideally these trucks would also run on the biofuel created by the landfill, but that’s another story.) Recycled glass, for example, is used to create exotic mosaic tiles that can outlast any comparable material. The Mohawk group, a leader in the flooring industry, has chosen to work with plastics and rubber, both of which are incorporated into their carpets, rugs, vinyl and other home products.

Mohawk prides itself on being green and putting a dent in landfills. A nifty calculator placed on their homepage shows viewers how much of a difference Mohawk has made in the few seconds it’s taken to glance at their page. In a little less than a minute the numbers whizzing by denote that:

• 2700 PET bottles have been recycled into carpet yarn
• 31 pounds of tires have been recycled into door mats
• 3100 pounds of waste were diverted from the landfill

Quoted from their site; “Everything we do at Mohawk is green. We’re the largest recycler in the flooring industry, a net purchaser of waste, and leader in green technologies and innovations.”

In Nov, 2007, Mohawk unveiled their greenworks center in Chicago. In a press release they described the unique recycling model:  “GreenWorks Center is the first of its kind to not only process all major types of synthetic carpet fiber — accounting for 90 percent of the nation’s post-consumer carpet waste — but also the only recycling program to recover 90 percent of those materials into useable products…GreenWorks Center will process 100 percent of the carpet it receives, including fiber, backing and latex. It will also manage a variety of thermoplastic non-carpet recyclables, helping to further minimize the amount of carpet that finds its way to the landfills”

Mohawk’s impressive accomplishments since the introduction of greenworks include:

• the design of a carpet tile, free of PVC, that is 100% recyclable
• 3 billion PET bottles and cans recycled into fiber per year
• 30 million pounds of crumb rubber (from tires) diverted from landfills per year

Customers have the opportunity to choose from countless designs and as an additional incentive to buyers, 25 cents is donated to breast cancer research per square yard of carpet bought