Aquafil, an Italian textile company already widely known for Econyl, a recycled nylon made from waste, opened its first U.S.-based carpet recycling plant in Phoenix in 2019. The plant receives post-consumer carpets from Aquafil Carpet Collection facilities and disassembles them into three main components: a fiber called Nylon 6, polypropylene, and calcium carbonate. As Aquafil USA president Franco Rossi explains, the polypropylene is reused to make carpet backing and goes into injection-molding production, calcium carbonate is diverted into road construction and concrete, and Nylon 6 is sent to the Econyl Regeneration System in Slovenia.
“When you make nylon from recycled materials, from old nylon, like we do, instead of making nylon from petroleum, the global warming potential and embodied carbon emissions are reduced by 90 percent,” says Eric R. Nelson, executive vice president of Aquafil Carpet Recycling. “So there’s a massive benefit to our environment when you are able to recirculate that production process. That’s really what it’s all about—decoupling petroleum from the production process.”
To support this circular process, Aquafil operates five carpet collection facilities: the one in Phoenix, which recovers 36 million pounds of old carpets annually, and four additional facilities in Southern California and Arizona that help divert 12,500 tons of both carpeting and carpet pads. While today’s operations run smoothly, the company’s first effort to recycle carpet did not go so well. “Aquafil launched Econyl at the end of 2010, and from that time on, it has been on a constant search for new secondary material that could be transformed back into nylon without using any fossil fuels,” Rossi explains. “The carpet recycling project is a consequence of that larger project, which is making nylon out of waste.”