How does plastic become carpeting after recycling?

Question

project for future competion... any help? links would be great!

Answer 1

Yes, thats right, but the entire process is recycling....including the recycling of the carpet once its worn out.  Keep on recycling.

Answer 2

After plastic bottles (Polyethylene Therephthalate or PET) are collected, they are usually compacted into large bales for sale.  A processor buys the bales and chips the bottles into small flakes and cleans the flakes.  The flakes are typically sold to another processor for melting and extruding into PET yarn.  The yarn is then woven into carpet and other products like polar fleece, bags and other clothing.  Of course there's a lot of transportation costs in between.  

But what a great use of used plastic bottles.  Next question...how do you recycle the carpet made with recycled PET bottles.

Answer 3

How this works is really cool and the amazing thing is that one-in-four plastic beverage bottles in the North America is being recycled into a product called EverStrand fiber.

Polyethylene Terephthalate (or PET) is what makes up all of those plastic soda bottles and a number of other containers.  The next step for PET containers is to be cleaned and ground down into chips or even smaller bits.  This material is then cleaned again.

The next step is melting the chips down to a liquid.  It's from here that the material is now spun into carpet "yarn".

It's pretty amazing what can be done with PET once it's ground down to what the recycling field often calls pellets.  They can be formed into picnic tables, planters, railings, even the hulls of racing sailboats!