Our Story Starts With A Few Thousand Discarded Plastic Bottles...

And Culminates In Your Home As Earth-Friendly, Beautiful Carpet

It all started in 1999 in Summerville, Georgia when Mohawk began operating the world’s largest integrated plastic bottle recycling facility. Seeing how the U.S. recycles 30 percent of its plastic bottles, we found a way to use this untapped resource to everyone’s advantage.

We purchase 25 percent of these recycled bottles, a total of 215 million pounds each year. Now trying to envision this many bottles may be difficult. Consider all of the 20 oz. plastic soda bottles stacked from end to end, each bottle approximately nine inches tall. The resulting height is 6,926 Empire State Buildings stacked from end to end. Now that’s a lot of bottles!

From these polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles we can make our EverStrand carpet fibers in a state-of the art process.

EverStrand Brings the Consumer Process Full Circle

First, the plastic bottles are sorted, chopped into little chips, vigorously cleaned and then melted into polyester resin. The fibers are then cut and shipped to Mohawk carpet manufacturing facilities to make carpet sold in our EverStrand collections. Thus, the face fiber of EverStrand carpet is made of 100 percent post-consumer content.

And it doesn’t end there. Each part of the plastic bottle is reused. The caps and labels are transformed into other useful products such as plastic carpet cores. The best plastic bottles for making carpet have a “1” or “PET” symbol on the bottom. So be sure to recycle!

Effectively, the creation of EverStrand keeps reusable trash out of landfills and continues to furnish stunning households.

From original consumer use to Summerville, GA and then returning to consumers via Mohawk carpet, we can all continue to do our part protecting the environment.