Carpet Recycling Update 2025: As the delta shrinks between virgin and recycled carpet ingredients, collectors, processors and recyclers increasingly struggle to stay afloat – Aug/Sept 2025

By Darius Helm

Carpet, which until recently was the largest flooring category, is also the only type of flooring whose products are reclaimed and recycled through a national infrastructure of collectors, processors and end use markets. Yet it’s a volatile and challenging enterprise, more so now than ever, where somehow everything is going right and wrong at the same time.

Headwinds

What’s going wrong is that carpet sales are declining, so total waste volumes are also smaller. And even if the carpet market stabilizes or starts to turn positive, which is feasible, the decline is guaranteed to continue for at least five or ten years based on the current square footage of carpet being sold annually into the market and its expected lifespan. Conditions are even tougher in California, the heart of domestic carpet recycling (because until recently it was the only state to have laws mandating it), where carpet’s share of purchases versus other flooring options is lower than the national average. And exacerbating that issue is the fact that residential broadloom, which makes up the vast majority of the carpet being recycled in the U.S., has shifted over the last 15 years from mostly nylon to mostly PET. 

As PET carpet grew, recycled nylon’s established value, which had helped power the recycling community, was blunted by the costs associated with collecting and sorting PET and by the lack of robust markets for recycled PET carpet fiber. Despite many advances in recent years, often funded by grants dispensed through CARE (Carpet America Recovery Effort) using funds from California’s carpet assessment fees, the PET recycling problem is far from solved.

Producers of recycled polyurethane pad are also feeling the pressure. Slow carpet sales have reduced demand for pad, and to make matters worse, volume from other scrap foam sources, like mattresses, are driving down pricing. DC Foam Recycle, a subsidiary of Pret Industries, has gone from 12 locations two years ago to just three now. “The market seems to be shrinking faster than we are,” says Louis Renbaum, president of DC Foam, adding that volumes are down at least 65% from two years ago. The firm does not operate in California, so it doesn’t get a boost from the subsidies that come out of that program.

Renbaum notes that there are a handful of key buyers that are largely responsible for keeping the industry afloat, including Leggett & Platt and Mohawk, but the biggest of all, Richmond, Virginia-based Carpenter Company, has been the most critical partner. Nevertheless, Renbaum anticipates further tightening of the market until carpet starts gaining marketshare again.

Also going wrong is California’s ability to create new recycling legislation that is both coherent and effective. It essentially failed with AB863, a document rife with inconsistencies and errors and generally suffering from insufficient understanding of the business of recycling from all the necessary perspectives. There was a lot of clamor last year about how AB863 was mandating recycling for a wide range of flooring-resilient flooring, laminate, ceramic tile-but with no viable plan to collect and process these materials, among other issues. Now, a year later, AB863 is law, but gone are the other flooring categories, pushed somewhere down the road. And this law is apparently still enough of a mess that a new bill, AB80, is being put together to clean it up. 

So far, there are no clear indications that California’s legislators have a handle on all the moving parts and key issues remain unresolved, among them the 8% of assessments collected by CARE that are slated to go to California’s southern and northern unions for training, though CARE did launch the AB863-mandated Installer Grant Program earlier this summer. And it’s likely that CARE will be required to create a new 501(c)(3) organization to run the California program with a new governing board.

Tailwinds

What’s going right? CARE appears to be moving in the right direction, notwithstanding these new challenges. It has faced adversity from within and from without since its formation 23 years ago, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. Yet, despite it all, the years of missed targets, fines from CalRecycle, rancor between members, it’s now reliably surpassing its targets and helping to develop technologies and end-use markets for recycled carpet ingredients.

Last year, the California Carpet Stewardship Program hit a record high annual recycling rate of 38.5%, exceeding the goal of 34%, and in fact, exceeding annual goals for the third consecutive year. Sixteen new public drop-off sites were added, bringing the total to 159. In all, over 82 million pounds of carpet were collected across California last year, and over 90% of it was recycled. Notably, even as new carpet sales in California continue to drop, recycled output has continued to rise.

Also going right is the focus on circularity in recycling legislation in both New York and California. At its core, it is a positive development. Both states require that carpet sold there must meet certain minimums for post-consumer content and for circular content. 

However, if there’s one thing that over two decades of carpet recycling has shown, it’s that ideological alignment is not necessarily an ingredient for success. Sure, it helps when everyone has a common goal, but that doesn’t mean everyone rows in the same direction. This shift toward the concept of circularity is certainly elevating the role of recycling, and that is a welcome development, but the lack of an infrastructure and mechanisms to maximize and coordinate the flow of reclaimed materials threatens the viability of these new programs and regulations, according to industry experts. 

What is abundantly clear is that getting 5% carpet content back into carpet, and going to higher levels in the future, is a major technical challenge. Depolymerization is expected to be a critical pathway, but more progress needs to be made in that area. Also, redesign of carpet is likely to receive more attention, as well.

Bentley Mills, the only commercial carpet mill in California, recently started using recycled calcium carbonate filler from Circular Polymers in its carpet tiles to meet California’s requirement of 5% post-consumer recycled carpet content in its products by January 2028. Calcium carbonate, or limestone, can account for a big chunk of the weight of a carpet, as high as 30% or more in some cases, making for a much easier path to 5% than through, for instance, the use of the post-consumer content in a face fiber. And while virgin limestone is abundant and inexpensive, about two cents a pound, California pays subsidies of 17 cents a pound to drive its reuse. 

So, using this recycled filler makes economic sense, and it fulfills California’s requirements, even if it doesn’t seem to fulfill the spirit of the mission. But there’s not enough of it to go around anyway. Some mills will have to find their way to 5% through another ingredient.

Emerald Carpets, a manufacturer of trade show carpets, has formed a partnership with PureCycle Technologies to blend its PureFive Choice polypropylene resin into its existing fiber production to exceed California’s current recycled-content requirements. And PureCycle will recycle Emerald’s used carpets to turn into polypropylene pellets that Emerald will in turn use for new carpet, enabling it to meet California’s closed-loop recycled content requirements in 2028.

Circular Polymers by Ascend, which is based in Lincoln, California, actually had a growth year in 2024, thanks in part to increases in demand for recycled polymers in the industrial sector, particularly automotive, according to David Bender, CEO of Circular Polymers. Last April, Ascend Performance Materials, which is a majority joint venture (JV) partner in Circular Polymers, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, though Bender points out that, as a JV, his business is not impacted.

Circular Polymers collects all types of residential and commercial broadloom, recycling through various channels. It uses rotary impact separator technology to separate face fiber from the backing and filler, producing streams of PET, polypropylene and nylon, both 6 and 6,6 in both pellet and fiber form, and it reclaims calcium carbonate, as well.

Another significant player in the recycling market is Aquafil, which has shifted its focus from processing nylon 6 carpet, largely in Arizona, to make more Econyl nylon 6 at its facility in Slovenia to instead move its operations to the Los Angeles area and focus on recycling PET product for use in nonwoven applications. And it’s also looking at the viability of carpet tile recycling through a pilot plant in Italy.