Shaw joins EPA WasteWise Program

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) welcomed Shaw Industries, Inc., a carpet manufacturer and floor covering provider, as its newest WasteWise partner. WasteWise partners are organizations that voluntarily set goals to reduce municipal solid waste. Partners include businesses, institutions, and other organizations representing 50 industrial sectors committed to cutting costs and conserving natural resources. EPA provides WasteWise partners with technical assistance and helps promote the achievement of its partners.

Shaw is a recycler of post-consumer carpet, and the comprehensive Shaw Green Edge Recycling program reclaims and recycles carpet nationwide. At the company’s Evergreen Recycling Facility in Augusta, Georgia, post-consumer carpet is recovered and then remanufactured.

The by-product of the recycling process is also recovered for ultimate reuse as post-consumer recycled content in carpet backing. Shaw also manufactures a line of wood flooring from post-industrial recycled wood that uses 50 percent less harvested wood than comparable engineered wood flooring. Carpet scraps, along with all waste generated from laminate manufacturing at Shaw’s facility in Ringgold, Georgia, is diverted from landfills and used to generate fuel. An innovative waste-to-energy technology converts carpet and wood waste to steam energy through gasification.

Shaw is joining EPA’s WasteWise program as it is launching a project to better track its efforts in reducing the amount of post-industrial waste produced in all of its carpet, rug, hardwood and laminate manufacturing facilities. The total post-industrial waste produced will be compared to the amount of finished production, and Shaw intents to significantly reduce that percentage over the next three years and beyond.