Chapter 3
Principle One: Line to Circle

AT A GLANCE

WE ARE RUNNING OUT of things to mine and places to trash. Why not connect the two ends of the global economy and turn the line into a circle?. Useless waste becomes a valuable resource that we can circulate indefinitely. Abundance follows.

“We are allowed to be creative. And in being creative, it allows you to do things differently and find ways you haven’t even thought of before. And that type of environment makes it very rewarding, very exciting, to come to work every day.” Surrounded by neatly ordered machinery and glassware that could have come straight out of a high school chemistry class, Jeff Wright, senior chemist at Shaw Industries, looks nothing like the messy creative type. With $4 billion in annual sales and 25,000 employees, his company has nothing in common with the infamous start-up garages known for creative vibes. And the product he is talking about can hardly be called sexy: carpet tile.

For decades, old carpeting ended up at landfills. Approximately four billion tons of it gets wasted each year in the United States alone. Like many of the products we use every day, carpet is heavily petroleum dependent: up to 90 percent of the carpet today is made from synthetic materials, primarily nylon, polypropylene, and polyester.

So from the perspective of the disappearing linear economy, the four billion tons wasted each year are pure gold. Well, pure oil, actually. How can we possibly take that gold and use it again—turning a linear economy into a circular one? How do we move from line to circle?

If you take a conventional synthetic carpet—like the one you probably have under your feet right now—and slice a knife through it, you will notice that it is built in layers. On top are the soft, plush fibers, made in most cases of nylon, and on the bottom is backing, much of which is made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride). PVC, a product widely used in construction and other industries, has been linked to many controversies. For our purposes, however, only one controversy matters: in the production of carpeting, layers attached to PVC cannot be reused again, making such carpet automatically a one-time-use, throwaway product. But behind the scenes of the carpet mainstream, Shaw Industries developed a groundbreaking carpet backing that would change the company history and push the entire industry toward product infinity. And that happened over a decade ago!

The completely recyclable EcoWorx product hit the market in 1999, premiering at NeoCon, the largest interior design show in the United States. The birth of EcoWorx was a collaboration between divisions at Shaw and partnerships with outside companies, such as Dow Chemical.

“In the mid-1980s, when we first entered the carpet tile business, one of the things we wanted to do was to be able to differentiate ourselves, and we saw an opportunity to do so with a backing system.” In our interview video, James Jarrett, director of manufacturing for Commercial Broadloom at Shaw Industries, oozes confidence and firmness through his soft southern accent.

We went into PVC in the early ‘90s, and indeed, within five or six years, we’ve established ourselves as a significant player, and so at that point we were ready to really bring back out some of the ideas around doing something differently, in particular with a thermoplastic type of backing system. We were able to cannibalize parts of some other lines to piece together the EcoWorx line to do the development. And from that point forward, we had the ability to rapidly go through the iterative process of design, trial, and redesign. We spent some long, long months trying to find the right combination of chemistry to make it successful.

The time spent in development was long indeed, but well justified. You see, the traditional PVC products are quite flexible and therefore conform well to the floor. A lot of the products Shaw looked at to replace PVC were very rigid and thus would require a compromise of product quality and performance—a compromise this company was not ready to make. Recyclability and performance were necessary. The result of innovation endurance was the EcoWorx backing system, which is lighter and more flexible than traditional high-performance backing, for easier installation and more efficient shipping—all while being 100 percent recyclable. “From 1999, the initial launch, to 2002,so really three years later, the production of both of those backing systems—PVC and EcoWorx—was identical,” says Jeff Galloway, director of carpet tile operations. “While I thought it would be 10 or 15 percent of my business, it quickly became 50 percent and growing rapidly. In that time period, we had to retrain our workforce; we had to retool a lot of equipment; we spent around $30 million in this facility phasing out old technology and phasing in the new. We see today it was well worth that investment.” Indeed, as of 2013, two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies have EcoWorx products on their floors—among them, Bank of America, Home Depot, Microsoft, and Time Warner.

Steve Bradfield, corporate director for environmental affairs at Eco-Worx, explains the reason for such commercial success: “This was sort of the old-felt need, the holy grail of the carpet tile industry to create a backing that was as good as PVC, and even better than PVC. We did some projections and had a very strong feeling that we could forward-price this at the current market price and take a hit on our profitability during that time, and yet, with an idea that we would swing it the other way very quickly. And that is in fact what happened.”

But the riveting revenues are only one side of the story. On the other side is the costs—where once-wasted carpet tile has now become an infinite raw material. The EcoWorx “circular” economy is as simple as it can get. The old carpet tile is taken in, it’s ground up, and it goes into the air separator, whereby heavy components fall out as backing and light components get separated out as fiber. Aside from recycled carpet tiles, EcoWorx’s backing platform can take in recycled plastic grocery bags and many other similar materials, making this a very robust product.

Naturally, such a simple technology can work only if the collection of used tile is streamlined as well. Jeff Galloway explains:

Our customers are literally begging for sustainable solutions. They are looking for suppliers like Shaw Industries to come up with technology that is mainstream, that is simple to use. So when wesell every single square yard of carpet at this facility, it comes with an environmental guarantee, which is: when you are through with it, no matter where, no matter who, call that number—we’ll come and pick it up at our expense. For most customers, that is a pretty good deal: I don’t have to pay to get it to the landfill; all I have to do is call this number. It is a pretty simple process. From the engineering point of view, it is really exciting to see that process, really neat to think that just within few days of getting a phone call, that old carpet can be made into a new carpet.