Half the Weight of the Carpet is … What?!
A friend called the other day excited about peeling up a corner of her wall-to-wall carpeting in her new condo and finding a wood floor underneath! She was ecstatic and couldn’t wait to send me a picture (it was Red Oak). Wood flooring immediately raises the value of your property most always in excess of its cost. Those home improvement shows on TV that have “stagers” prepare a house for sale are a good example. If they do something beyond a paint job and removing the clutter, they’re tearing out a carpet and replacing it with wood flooring. If they’re flipping the property, there’s a wood floor going in somewhere. Wood flooring is a universally recognized signature of quality. Check out the real estate ads in your town and see how often wood flooring is mentioned as a selling point.
Her next phone call wasn’t as pleasant as she was in the middle having the carpet removed, and getting a firsthand experience of what that carpet was harboring. What she saw was bad enough, and what she couldn’t see was worse: colonies of dust mites. In fact, if your job was researching dust mites, and you wanted to create the perfect environment to raise generations of them, you’d design and build a carpet from the ground up.
We get trade magazines that report on the entire flooring industry. Most of the contents are devoted to product categories we don’t sell, like carpet or plastic laminate. Given the lifespan of these products they’re destined to spend most of their time on this earth leaching poisons into a landfill. Some companies brag about they’re recycling efforts but there is none for laminate and the only use for recycled carpeting is as a contributing ingredient to the pad (which merely postpones the trip to the landfill). The magazine article about this subject explained that they’re not interested in your carpeting, so don’t expect a carpet recycling center in your neighborhood any time soon. They prefer a trailer load of the same stuff which can only come from large renovations like hotels or offices. So it’s high-end, commercially rated carpet, that’s been professionally maintained since day one. Here’s the punchline: 46% of the weight of the used carpet, is dirt!