INITIATIVE | 002 Evergreen is the largest Type 6 Nylon recycling facility in the world. It’s one of Shaw’s flagship examples of Sustainability through Innovation and a significant part of our post-consumer carpet reclamation and recycling leadership.
Designed to recover caprolactam (the monomer or “building block” for Type 6 Nylon) from post-consumer carpet over and over again without degrading the material, Evergreen was acquired by Shaw in 2005 and re-commissioned in 2007 after more than $30 million in upgrades and improvements to the facility’s efficiency and capacity. To date, more than 90 million pounds of post-consumer carpet are recycled through Evergreen each year, and more than 200 million pounds of post-consumer carpet have been recycled at the facility between early 2007 and year-end 2009.
Click here to see how Evergreen works.
In 2008, Shaw introduced another innovative step in the Evergreen process: we began using Evergreen’s waste “co-product” as post-consumer recycled content. The co-product (produced by Evergreen as part of the caprolactam recovery process) is first used in kilns to create steam for boilers at a partner company in Cartersville, Georgia. After the organic material has been used as an alternative energy source, the remaining calcium carbonate is returned to Shaw for use as post-consumer recycled content in our EcoWorx commercial carpet backing – creating a truly innovative and closed loop recycling process.
