Quicksilver Recycling

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Carpet Recovery

Quicksilver Recycling Services operates a Carpet Recovery Center for the Tampa Bay area to collect post-consumer carpet. The facility, located in Safety Harbor, is ideally located to serve Pasco, Pinellas and Hillsborough counties with the ability to reach out even further to the outlying counties.

Carpet Retail Stores now have an alternative to expensive landfill disposal as well as the knowledge that their waste will be in a recycling program endorsed by CARE.

Background & Status Of Carpet Recovery

Carpet removed from homes, apartments, offices and other larger facilities such as airport terminals, hotels and sports arenas can be recovered for recycling. It is a relatively new and emerging concept. In fact, the general public is still unaware of this.

Instrumental in the development of the recent carpet recycling trend is the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE). Quicksilver Recycling Services is proud to be a part of this innovative organization.

About CARE (www.carpetrecovery.com)

Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) is a joint industry-government effort to increase the amount of recycling and reuse of post-consumer carpet and reduce the amount of waste carpet going to landfills. CARE was established as a result of a Memorandum of Understanding for Carpet Stewardship (MOU), a national agreement signed by members of the carpet industry, representatives of government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, and non governmental organizations.

CARE Mission Statement: CARE's mission is to foster market-based solutions for recovering value from discarded carpet to meet the goals of the negotiated outcomes.

To accomplish its mission, CARE facilitates, advises, provides resources, and serves as a forum for the many different stakeholders.

CARE is funded and administered by the carpet industry, which agrees to use CARE to:

- Enhance the collection infrastructure for post-consumer carpet.
- Serve as a resource for technical, economic and market development opportunities for recovered carpet.
- Develop and perform quantitative measurement and reporting on progress toward the national goals for carpet recovery.
- Work collectively to seek and provide funding opportunities for activities to support the national goals for carpet recovery.

Evaluation and Reporting

Through CARE, carpet industry members and government entities are jointly responsible for monitoring, assessing and reporting on the progress toward the national goals for carpet recovery as agreed upon in the MOU. Stakeholders outside of the carpet industry maintain active roles in CARE to assist with data collection, analysis, and program evaluation to ensure transparency in reporting on the status of activity. A series of reports is planned to show progress toward the goals in the MOU.

Sponsorship

CARE is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization which solicits contributions (financial and otherwise) from corporations, government agencies and anyone else with a vested interest in diverting carpet from landfills. Each contribution signifies good faith support and a willingness to participate in the process of helping achieve CARE's objective of 40% landfill diversion by the year 2012.

Market Developments

Collecting waste carpet for recycle and diverting it from a landfill is not feasible unless there is a market for it. CARE has been instrumental in working with industry to encourage the development for the need for this waste material and the effect of rising oil costs has also been a major factor.

Opportunities now exist to gain value from carpet waste; much of it is readily recyclable. Nylon fiber, the most prominent type of carpet fiber, is a valuable polymer and can be used in many different applications. Now recovered materials from waste carpet can be recycled into a variety of new products.

Efforts are underway nationally to increase the options for recycling waste carpet to make new products using recycled content.

There are a number of options for managing waste carpet: direct reuse, refurbishment, recycling fiber into other plastic products, recycling carpet backing into new carpet backing, and "carpet-to-carpet recycling."

The carpet industry has devoted considerable time and effort into finding end uses for waste carpet. All of the major manufacturers of carpet and face fiber have committed many resources into developing processes for recycling post-consumer and post-industrial fiber.

Carpet Collection

With the demand now developing, there is a strong need to create the collection capabilities in large metropolitan areas where there is an ample supply of waste carpet. Typically, each household changes out its carpet every seven (7) years and commercial facilities and rental apartment units do so even sooner.

In an area like the Tampa Bay with a population of over 2.7 million people, there are an estimated 46 million pounds of carpet removed each year. This is based on surveys that indicate that 17 pounds of carpet/person/year is land- filled. Using Quicksilver, Carpet Retail Stores now have and alternative to expensive landfill disposal as well as the knowledge that their waste will be in a recycling program endorsed by CARE.

The Quicksilver Carpet Collection Program

The 12,500 sq ft Quicksilver facility, ideally located in Safety Harbor, has the capability to collect, sort by type, bale and store carpet for bulk shipments to the various end users. In the future, collection only facilities may be needed to service more distant counties. These facilities will ship to the Quicksilver "Super Sort Center" in Safety Harbor for final processing.

The primary operations of our Super Sort Center are:

Collection

Quicksilver offers retail carpet stores a less expensive recycling option vs. land filling for their post-consumer carpet.

In order to keep carpet dry, a closed container is placed at a contracted retail store for filling by the carpet installers who remove the old carpet when installing new. Quicksilver is notified when a container is full and will dispatch for its pickup and replacement with an empty.

This container will reduce the need for the typical waste hauler’s larger 20-30 yd. open top roll-off waste container and save the stores about 1/3rd on disposal costs.

Receiving, Sorting & Test

Material is received in bulk with about 3 ½ tons per load. This would be equivalent to a 20 cubic yard roll-off. The bulk load of carpet is dumped on the floor and the empty container returned to the pickup location. Distant locations may have a container swap performed on site.

The bulk pile contains a mixture of carpet types and carpet padding. Using a specific technology and equipment developed for the carpet industry, each piece of carpet is be tested and fiber makeup determined, i.e., Nylon 6, Nylon 66, Polypropylene, unknown, etc, and segregated into piles by type. Padding is separated into two piles by a visual test only.

When sufficient quantities of a particular type are available, that pile is moved to the baler.

Baling

For baling, Quicksilver uses a Marathon Baler, Model TR10/50 with a new Heavy Duty Closed Frame In-feed Conveyor. Baling of carpet requires a rather beefy machine and this unit with a 50 hp motor and 10" piston is sized to handle our needs. As a labor-saving feature the unit is equipped with a wire auto-tie feature to hold the bales together after the carpet is compacted.

The output from the baler is individual bales measuring 45" X 30" X 62", each weighting about 1000-1200 lbs.

Storage & Shipping

Individual completed bales are moved to a storage area and stacked by type to await accumulation of sufficient volume for shipment to an end user. A typical shipment is 35-40 bales at about 40,000lbs.

Location & Contact Information

To lean more about our carpet recovery program and how it can help reduce your disposal costs, see Contact Us.