It's easy being green.
Despite promises made freely in the commercial marketplace, past the jargon and the talk, it is important to make sense of the term being 'green.' The Zeftron brand's aim is to cut through the confusion by offering a glossary of terms regarding reclamation and recycling—and true sustainability—in the commercial carpet arena.
Nylon 6ix® and nylon 6,6 are two of the most popular carpet fibers used in commercial carpet today. Both really perform. Both are extremely durable. And both support versatile coloring and styling effects. But there is one important underlying difference. Only nylon 6 is recyclable.
Nylon 6ix®, because of its inherent chemical makeup, can be fully renewed through the closed-loop process utilized in the 6ix Again Carpet Recycling Program. This patented process does exactly as it sounds: it closes the traditional recycling loop and enables nylon 6ix to retain all of its original quality—performance, durability and coloration characteristics—each time it's recycled.
In essence, nylon 6 can be recycled over and over again, and in the end, it will look and perform exactly like a brand new nylon yarn because it is brand new. That's our edge.
Download Zeftron nylon's 3-Part Specification for Carpet Reclamation.
The Meaning of Green:
- Carpet Recycling: A generic term that includes all types of recycling and reclamation of various carpet components, including fibers and backing materials.
- Carpet Reclamation for Reuse: Refers to the cleaning and repair of used carpet for reinstallation and/or reuse.
- Downcycling: A form of recycling in which carpet fibers are separated and re-melted to be used in other, less critical plastic applications. In this process, nylon quality is degraded overtime and cycles, eventually to a point where it can no longer be re-used and must be disposed of—typically in a landfill. This is how nylon 6,6 is 'recycled'.
- Closed-Loop Recycling: The most sophisticated form of recycling, where carpet fibers are chemically renewed, or depolymerized, and remanufactured into first quality carpet fiber once again. Applicable only to nylon 6 fiber.
- Nylon 6: Carpet material that consists of only one raw material (or monomer), a property that allows it to be easily depolymerized into its original material—caprolactam—and then re-made into high-quality carpet fiber over and again, with no loss in quality.
- Nylon 6,6: Carpet material that is made of two elements (monomers), a trait that makes it very difficult to separate in an economical depolymerization process. Most often, nylon 6,6 is melted into a liquid plastic form and 'downcycled' rather than truly renewed and re-made into carpet fiber.
- Post-industrial Recycled Content: A limited source of recycled content that consists only of waste generated during the manufacturing process.
- Post-consumer Recycled content: Recycled content that comes from used and reclaimed carpet at the end of its useful life.