The goal of this workshop is to develop synergy between the progress made within the carpet industry in recovery, reuse, and recycling of carpet materials and other industries involved in producing materials used in interiors, such as resilient flooring, coving, and ceiling tiles. The resulting systems-level understanding of building deconstruction for interior materials will provide a foundation for the total system. The workshop will bring together participants from the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE), which is a voluntary non-profit organization dedicated to developing market-driven solutions to the reuse and recycling of post-consumer carpeting, its carpet industry member companies, The Resilient Flooring Institute, Tarkett, Armstrong, academia and government. Increasing demand for building materials as China, India, and other developing countries grow will necessitate the recovery of materials from building deconstruction. A successful workshop will develop large-scale inter-industry logistical systems, identification technology and processing technology, supported by logistic models, which will lead to unprecedented economies of scale for reclamation.
The workshop will review a comprehensive market analysis, which is developed through a separate initiative, designed to benchmark current activities; identify potential economies of scale for reclamation operations and the magnitude of the material flows from building interior renovations that could be recovered; examine geographic distribution of materials to determine how geography affects reverse logistics and economics vs. virgin materials; develop a framework for modeling the tradeoffs between separate and combined material recovery; and identify barriers in the market and incentive structures that can be created to enable combined material recovery. The report and other materials generated from the workshop will benefit the Services Enterprise Systems program in the Division of Design and Manufacturing Innovation (DMI) as well as the new Environmental Sustainability program in the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Systems (BES) of NSF.
