Drywall Waste Diverted From Landfill to Vinyl Carpet Backing and Tile

SALEM, N.J., Feb. 1, 2008 (VNS) – Tapping one of the largest construction waste streams, flooring company Mannington Industries is recycling drywall gypsum, adding it to vinyl carpet backing and vinyl tile. In the past year, Mannington has recycled over 115 tons of drywall waste.

This recycled material has been added to Infinity® RE carpet backing since that product was launched in 2007 and to several lines of vinyl tile since 2006.

“The process only uses the drywall waste from new construction,” said Dave Kitts, Mannington vice president-environment. “All paper facing and backing are removed and there is no paint to deal with, just the gypsum ground into powder.”

The idea germinated a couple of years ago, when Kitts took a look at a bag of powdered drywall gypsum that Avi Golen, president of Philadelphia-based Construction Waste Management, brought to a meeting of the Delaware Valley Green Building Council. Until then, Golen’s only market for the recycled material had been in soil amendment.

“It was an ah-ha moment,” Kitts recalled. “I wondered if there was something we could do with it.” The answer was yes – and within a couple of months, Golen drove the first truckload of powdered gypsum down to Mannington’s factory.

“When I first heard about this initiative, I was blown away,” said Sandy Wiggins in an interview when he was chair-elect of the U.S. Green Building Council.

“This is what we try to accomplish with all our recyclable materials,” Golen said. “It’s creating a higher and better use rather than downcycling the material…We create something just as good as what came off the site as waste.”

“This isn’t about high percentage recycled content,” Kitts said, noting that the reclaimed gypsum is a small component of the individual finished product. “This is about taking back waste streams that typically end up in landfills.”

The United States generates 136 million tons of construction waste a year – accounting for nearly half of all material that is landfilled.