Carpet You Could Live With

The economic crisis is affecting everyone. Unemployment is higher than it has been in more than a decade and in some places as many as one out of every six working age adults is without work. To put it bluntly: the economy sucks right now.

The housing market from Rhode Island to Miami and up to Seattle is bad -- improving-- but still bad. In the midst of the worst housing downturn in seventy years, a lot of homeowners have learned that moving up to a better home just isn't an option right now. Their alternative is to make the home that they have a better place for them to live. So they're remodeling.

From ripping out old kitchens and baths to making the tough and costly decision to add on a room, homeowners are rolling up their sleeves and building their own dream home right where they are. But while many homeowners are remodeling, not enough of them are doing so to keep earnings at the country's largest do-it-yourself superstores climbing. Six weeks ago, The Home Depot reported a drop in earnings and so did Lowes.

More importantly, however than how well the big stores are doing, is what are homeowners doing when they're remodeling their places top-to-bottom.

I hope that they're recycling. As a kid I remember a buddy and I scoring big time stuff for our clubhouse from the curbside trash of neighbors. I especially remember the carpet remnant we dragged through the woods to our very own Fortress of Solitude. I remember because when we started a fire in an old cast iron pot -- we wouldn't think of just starting a fire without protection -- we forgot that the heat would pass through the pot and start burning our precious red shag carpet. We survived and tossed the burnt rug into the trash along with miles and miles and tons and tons of other old, worn carpet from everyone else's homes.

That doesn't have to be the case today: homeowners can choose to recycle carpet. The Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE -- yes, overused and corny, but it works) is a national association committed to keeping old carpet out of landfills and directing it to be reused. There's a carpet recovery/recycling company here in Northern VA. According to the CARE website, the organization and its partners have diverted more than 1.3 billion tons of carpet from America's landfills. That's a lot of shag!

Put another way, by diverting and recycling the carpet into other uses, CARE and the homeowners that choose to go this route have helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 238,000 tons or about the equivalent of two million barrels of oil.

The fact is there are opportunities for all of us to do something with our garbage that is better than letting it pile up in a landfill somewhere. So when you're remodeling your home or doing just about anything, think about how what you're doing can be done with a green theme. You'll like the result and our grandchildren will too.