[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 157 (Tuesday, November 9, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14431-S14432]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    EVERGREEN CARPET RECYCLING PLANT

 Mr. CLELAND. Mr. President, I rise today to express my support 
of private sector innovation to solve a public problem. My state is the 
site of a brand new, state of the art facility that will recycle 
carpets, chemically breaking them down to their virgin chemical 
components. Allied Signal and DSM are jointly opening the first-ever 
carpet recycling plant in Augusta, GA, on November 15. It's a fitting 
day for the opening of a carpet recycling plant since it is America 
Recycles Day 1999.
  Carpets comprise of a significant portion of the Nation's landfills. 
Yet there are few programs at the state or local level targeted to 
redirecting carpets out of community landfills. The AlliedSignal-DSM 
facility, aptly named ``Evergreen,'' will ensure that each year over 
200 million pounds of carpet never see a landfill. Now it may be hard 
to imagine 200 million pounds of carpet, so let me help you visualize 
it. If you had a 12 foot wide roll of carpeting you could lay it from 
New York to San Francisco and back again, and that would equal about 
200 million pounds. And the Evergreen facility will save that much 
landfill space each year.
  The carpeting that will be recycled in Augusta will not simply be 
broken down mechanically and remade into new carpets. Instead it will 
be depolymerized--broken down chemically into the individual chemical 
polymers that comprise the nylon fiber in the carpets. The primary 
chemical is caprolactum, but they can't produce enough at their 
facilities to meet the demands of their customers.
  So they had a choice to make--either find another source of 
caprolactum or build new chemical plants that could be used to make 
caprolactum. With dedicated research engineers, they made several 
technological breakthroughs that enabled them to obtain caprolactum 
from used carpeting in a more economical fashion than to produce it at 
a new chemical plant. They can actually recycle old carpets into 
caprolactum more economically than they could produce it from scratch.
  Avoiding the production of caprolatum in itself yields tremendous 
environmental benefits. To produce from scratch the amount of 
caprolactum that the Evergreen facility will generate would take more 
than 700 million barrels of oil a year, and 4 trillion Btus more in 
energy usage. That is enough energy to heat 100,000

[[Page S14432]]

homes a year. So it is not just landfill space that is saved under the 
Evergreen project.
  AlliedSignal and DSM plan to market nylon 6 products made with 
caprolactum from the Evergreen facility to carpet manufacturers, auto 
makers and others to produce the highest quality nylon products. You 
will soon see Infinity Forever Renewable Nylon on products in early 
2000.
  I applaud the private sector initiatives that led to the evergreen 
project and I am particularly pleased that they have chosen the great 
state of Georgia in which to operate.

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