Everything Can Be Recycled, Even Carpet?
Yesterday, Julia, my little friend’s niece came to me and showed me that her teacher taught them that carpet could be recycled.
– No it is not recyclable, I said mindlessly . It could be possible to use it again, but surely impossible to be recycled.
As she was keeping on arguing against me and even said that those carpet recyclers had their own association in the U.S.. I decided to go online and searched it out. As it appear, the little girl was amazingly correct. There is truly an organisation of carpet recyclers in North America. As I was keeping on searching, I found that there is even a construction waste recycler in my area that handle such items. I found about Recyconstruction and Recymobililer in my sector : they take care of recycling almost all appliances, furniture, electronic equipment and construction waste. I spoke to a recycling specialist, Jason, and he explained to me all the things that are recyclable as of now.
– Carpet is shredded and recycled for the plastic it contains, it might end up as a new carpet or something else made with plastic.
– Wood waste are sent to an electric producer, who use wood to generate power. The process is a smoke less combustion that do no impact on climate changes.
– Sheetrock are passed through some machines and transformed into powder, pulp and paint are taken off, and the remaining gypsum can serve in agriculture or serve to make new gypsum walls.
And it goes on and on to all type of material. It is incredibly amazing to understand that we are at that point. To people expecting to earn money by selling their old sofa or wood, It would be important to add that there are fees to recycle that type of material.
– We were only in the area of computer recycling before. However, since at some point we were exclusively recycling the items that we were getting since it was not worth to resell it, we were forced to charge a fee to some items that cost more to recycle than to send to landfill. Since we understood that people want to make a difference for the planet and were were OK with paying a little fee to help with the handling of the material, we thought it was time to add more recycling services that couldn’t be sustainable by their recyclable content to provide an alternative to landfill.
– Luckily, the service received an exceptional feedback, as it came to life when people started to realize about our impact on the planet, personally or on a business level. Businesses and building managers are getting more aware of the green advantages, reason why more and more building managers are fighting to become LEED certified.