A few days ago, Suzie, my little friend’s niece ran to me and said that her teacher told them that carpet is recyclable.
– No it can not be recycled, was my answer. It might be possible to reuse it, but doubtlessly impossible to be recycled.
That didn’t make her stop arguing against me and even told me that carpet recyclers had their own organization in U.S.A.. I decided to go on Google and checked for it. Apparently, the little girl was incredibly right. There is really an association of carpet recyclers in North America. And there is also a construction waste recycler in my area that handle such items. I found out Recymobilier and Recyconstruction in my area : they take care of recycling any appliances, furniture, electronic waste and construction debris. I talked to a recycling specialist, Ianick, and he was explaining to me about all the material that it is possible to recycle as of now.
– Carpet is recycled for its plastic content, it could end up as a new carpet or anything else that is made with plastic.
– Wood is transported to an electric producer, who use it to make power. It is a smoke-less combustion process that do not add up to global warming.
– Sheetrock are passed through machines and shredded, pulp as well as paint are removed, and the gypsum will either serve as fertilizer or serve to make new gypsum walls.
And it goes on and on for each type of material. I found it incredibly wonderful to realize that we are standing there. To people expecting to make money out of their old couch or paint, It would be important to add that there are fees to recycle that type of material.
– We used to work only in the area of electronic waste recycling before. It changed, since at one point we were exclusively recycling the items that we were accepting since it was not worth to resell it, we started to put a fee to some items that were more expensive to us to properly recycle than to toss away. Since we understood that most people were interested in making a difference for the environment and were were OK with paying a small fee to help with our handling of the material, we decided to add more recycling services that couldn’t be sustainable by themselves to provide an another option than landfill.
– Fortunately, those services received an exceptional response, as it came to the market when people started to realize about our footprint on the ecosystems, personally or on a business level. Industries and building managers are more than aware of the green advantages, reason why a lot of building managers are competing to be LEED certified.
