CARE Awards Shaw, Mohawk for Recycling

Staff -- Home Textiles Today, 5/4/2009 12:00:00 AM

Lansdowne, Va. —

The Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) this week honored four innovators from the growing world of post-consumer carpet recycling — including Shaw and Mohawk — at the organization's seventh annual conference.

Held here at the National Conference Center from April 28 to May 1, the event set the stage for the recycling group to announce this year's winners of the "EPA/CARE Innovations in Recycling" award and the "CARE Recycler of the Year" and "Person of the Year" awards.

Established just two years ago, the EPA/CARE award recognizes innovation in a product containing post-consumer carpet content, or a process that diverts substantial amounts of post-consumer carpet from landfills, the organization explained. This year the award was shared by: Shaw Industries' Evergreen Nylon recycling facility, and the Los Angeles Fiber Company and its president, Ronald Greitzer.

Since Shaw began operating the Evergreen plant in 2007, the company has recycled more than 220 million pounds of post-consumer Nylon 6 carpet and more than 36 million pounds of post-consumer carpet filler..

And Ron Greitzer, who the organization described as "a visionary and unselfish leader," has given more than a decade of involvement in carpet recycling.

As CARE's Recycler of the Year, Mohawk Industries was recognized for its GreenWorks post-consumer recycling center, which converts post-consumer carpet into engineered resins that can be used in a broad range of valuable post-consumer products.

For "his exemplary leadership" on the CARE board, as chairman of various CARE committees, Brendan McSheehy Jr. was named CARE Person of the Year. He has long been involved in carpet fiber research and recycling since 1993.