Carter Oosterhouse Video Blog
Topic: Carpet Made From 100% Recycled Plastic Bottles

Carter: What's up guys! Carter here. Now as a kid we always used to recycle our plastic bottles around my parent's house, but I was really curious, where they went, what happened to them when they left the house? I mean, do they turn into new plastic bottles, or do they just end up in landfills?

So I did a little bit of research and I found out that there are a ton of uses for recycled plastic. The chair that you are sitting on might be made out of recycled plastic. A deck might be made out of recycled plastic. The carpet could be made from recycled plastic, and I am not just talking about a little mat that's at your front door. I am talking about a bona-fide thick carpet, wall-to-wall carpet can be made from recycled plastic bottles. Watch this!

8.2 million plastic bottles come to the Mohawk Industries Factory everyday, sent from recycling companies all over North America. These are the bottles from your home, you office, your neighborhood schools. They come flattened out, barreled up and dirty.

So first what they've got to do is break them apart. Look how cool this is. The clear bottles are separated from the colors so the final carpets don't all turn out green.

Sharp blades slice and dice the bottles into teeny-tiny flakes, and basically pulverize them. As the flakes are washed, the thicker bottle cap pieces float to the top and are separated out from the rest of the flakes.

Now those are taken and used to form the carpet cores, which the end product will be wrapped around. When all the pieces are cleaned and dried the extrusion process begins. The flakes are heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and melted down to a molten liquid.

It's poured in to a spinneret, which is basically like a big showerhead with 1200 holes. Thicken the melted plastic like water, pouring through the showerhead, except the plastic passes through holes and sections off into long thin fibers about the size of human hair.

The fibers are stretched out and cooled. And then they are cramped into a tight weave. All this is squished down and bailed up. Then sent to a different factory where it's turned into yarn. This is just like how cotton is turned into string. From here on, it's the normal process that any form of machine- made toughened carpet will go through.

There are over 1000 needles used for each carpet, and each needle makes 18 stitches per second. You can get nearly any color you want, when all the carpets are dyed the water used is being recycled over-and-over again.

Okay, here is the cool fact. Mohawk Industries alone makes enough recycled carpets everyday to extend across 2500 football fields. The question is, would you rather have that carpet use raw materials or recycled materials. 8.2 million bottles a day, not going into a landfill.

I used the Mohawk recycled carpeting on an episode of Carter Can, and the home-owners had no idea that their brand new carpet was made from recycled plastic bottles, until I told them. And when you feel it because the plastic was turned into yarn it's just as soft, just as comfortable as any carpet made from wool or any other synthetic material.

And one last question I am sure you are asking, what does it cost? Well, it costs roughly the same amount as any other synthetic carpet of the same grade. Really nice carpet for your home, a good idea, creating products that hold up and green up, a great idea.

So for more information on green products and materials keep coming back to the site. Talk to you soon.