Key Takeaways
Have you ever inquire how rug is made ? To be sure , carpeting is n’t the sexiest topic of conversation you ’ll ever bring up at a political party , but it ’s actually pretty interesting . Consider this nerveless small factoid : The carpet you currently have in your family may have been boiled in a vat of water at some pointedness . It ’s one method of dyeing carpet during output .
Do n’t blame yourself if you do n’t know much about how carpet is made , even if you ’re stick out or sitting on some flop now . Something as pedestrian and prosaic as carpet is easy to take for granted . We ’ve been decorating our menage with carpet since roving mediate easterly tribes lay it down in their hut 2,500 year ago . Today , more than a billion square foot ( nearly 93 million square meters ) of carpeting is develop in the United States each year ; about 70 percentage of that comes from a single town , Dalton , Ga. [ source : Torpy , Seacrest ] . Carpet may be slightly comfortable to dominate , but if you get down close to the material , you ’ll see not all carpet is alike .
you’re able to learn quite a spot about rug just by running your fingers over it . You ’ll notice out whether thepile– the exposed top part of carpet we normally refer to as " carpet " – is compose of individual Strand ( hack pile ) or closed grommet ( tufted ) . You ’ll also be able-bodied to set the density , orface free weight , of the mass . You may also find that what you thought was a monochromic carpet is actually the result of an optic illusion where several unlike dyestuff combine to make what looks like one semblance .
How is carpet create ? What happens during its existence ? rent ’s find out on the next page .
The Process of Making Carpet
That plush ocean of carpet keeping the floor of your living room nice and soft really starts off as a lot of lax strands of fibers calledstaples . The staple are put into a hopper where they ’re heated , lubricated and formed into slivers , which are wound into a foresighted spool of fiber . From there , the carpeting - making process is ready to start .
Most carpet made today is tufted , or woven into closed eyelet . This method was educate in Dalton , Ga. – the rug capital of the world – near the good turn of the last century . Here ’s how it work : A needle pushes the carpeting fibers through the bottom of a piece of material called thecarpet backing . A bait call a looper holds the fiber in place as the acerate leaf goes back down into the backing , make the loop . It sounds a scrap tedious , and it must have been before the advent of automated tufting machines . Today , these political machine measure about 12 feet ( 3.65 meters ) wide , with between 800 to 1,200 needle solve to make carpet chop-chop and steadily [ source : Carpeteria ] .
If the carpet is supposed to be tufted , then the factual instauration process ends here . If cut spate rug is being construct , however , then the tufted carpeting goes through an extra step where the loopers holding the individual pile fibril are pulled over sharp knife . This cut the loops into the single strands that make up a cut pile carpet .
The coloring process may take place at different stages in yield , reckon on the want visual effect . As we mentioned earlier , some carpet is put into ad valorem tax of water after production and boiled while dye are mixed into the container . This is have it away as theBeck outgrowth . Another method , continuous dyeing , rolls and spray dye onto ruined carpet . Still another , pre - dyeing , takes place before the carpet is serve . The actual yarn that will be used in the tufting mental process is dyed beforehand , which allows for uniform color .
Once the carpet is finished , it ’s washed , dried and vacuum-clean . Errant down are trim and then it ’s commit on a conveyor swath past a final employee who uses a pile gun to fill in any overlooked bare areas . The carpeting is now finished .
Sounds jolly straightforward , but what happens after you ’ve grease one’s palms and used the carpeting and are ready to shake off it out ? What does it take to recycle honest-to-god carpet ? happen out on the next pageboy .
What to Do With Old Carpet
By now , you ’ve sure as shooting figured out that rug is n’t just some roll of cloth that ’s spit out of a machine . There are several components to it – backup , vulcanized fiber and , once installed , padding . Most , if not all , of these region are made of dissimilar substances . Carpet fibers are most often synthetic . They ’re usually made of polypropylene , polyester or nylon , but they ’re sometimes made of natural fibre like woolen or cotton plant . The backing that fibers are woven into is most commonly meander PVC or latex . Carpet cushioning is unremarkably made of foam India rubber .
alas , a whole length of used rug could n’t be recycled because each component ’s component would corrupt the others . The good news is all of these disparate components can be break down into their respective parts so they can be recycle . The bad news is that rug recycling in its current form is expensive and carpet recycling centers can be knockout to find .
The expense of recycling carpeting is found for the most part in the metre it takes to break carpet down into its raw stuff . presently , it costs anywhere from five to 25 cents per British pound sterling to do so [ seed : CARE ] . Anyone who ’s ever lifted a roller of rug have a go at it that costs can add up apace when it follow to recycling carpet .
Still , it ’s a lot more sustainable to reuse old carpet than to simply cast away it in the landfill . The Carpet America Recovery Effort ( CARE ) intimate that anyone count to reuse carpet should contact a rug dealer . CARE want to ensure that as much as 40 percentage of old rug is recycled by 2012 . Sure , it will be consumer some coin , but the carpeting will end up in myriad other ware like manufactured Isidor Feinstein Stone , auto part and cap shingles . Who knows ? A house being totally renovated may end up with Modern carpeting on its floors and recycled carpeting on its roof .
