Where is carpet made

CARE wants to ensure that as much as 40 percent of old carpeting is recycled by Sure, it will cost consumers some coin, but the carpet will end up in myriad other products like manufactured stone, auto parts and roof shingles.

Who knows? A house being totally renovated may end up with new carpet on its floors and recycled carpet on its roof. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.

Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Home Improvement. Home DIY. How is carpet made? The Process of Making Carpet " ". What to Do With Old Carpet " ".

Recycling this old carpet and padding is expensive but more sustainable than tossing it in the dump. Sources Seacrest, Rose. Accessed April 23, I also provide some useful information about carpet cost so you can figure out how much new carpet may be for your home. Alan Fletcher — aka CarpetProfessor. December 11, at Your email address will not be published. Learning Center Find the answers to your home improvement questions. How is Carpet Made?

Carpet Weaving Loom. Related posts: No related posts. Robert Lane - Reply September 6, at Alan Fletcher - Reply June 3, at Tom Elpers - Reply December 11, at What is the best method of separating the pile from the backing?

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In spite of decades of incremental progress, woven carpets were still too expensive to penetrate the working class market. The wholesale price of woven carpets rose slightly during the s.

The quite modest increases were interpreted within the industry as something of a success. The woven carpet manufacturers also tried other strategies to boost sales in the s. The chief impact of the advertising campaigns seems to have been to raise awareness of and desire for carpeting in general. In , this would have seemed a winning strategy. During the same decade, however, a new southern industry produced a cheaper substitute for woven goods — tufted carpets and rugs, whose sales grew from near zero in the late s to more than million square yards by The origins of this new carpet industry in the South can be traced to a combination of purposeful action and historical accident.

The historical accident, as Krugman called it, was the revival of the hand tufting tradition in northwest Georgia and elsewhere in the region in the early twentieth century. To create a tufted bedspread, the craftsperson inserted raised tufts of yarn into a pre-woven piece of backing material generally cotton sheeting to form a pattern, then boiled the sheeting to shrink it and lock in the tufts of yarn.

Evans duplicated the design and made a similar spread as a wedding gift. Evans and some of her relatives began teaching other area women the art of tufting. From these beginnings, a cottage industry developed. The haulers returned later to pay the farm families for their hand work and pick up tufted spreads for finishing — washing and, for some, dyeing. These spreads found a ready market, not just regionally, but in the northeast as well.

This cottage industry became a source of economic growth in north Georgia even during the Great Depression. After the Civil War, and especially after , southern firms had borrowed northern technology, begun at the bottom of the quality chain with the coarsest fabrics, and initiated what might be called a process of regional learning.

Much of this development was the result of a purposeful effort to industrialize the region. By the early twentieth century, the South still had not developed a regional textile machine-making industry, but the cotton mills, hosiery mills, and other textile firms had recruited and trained a large number of mechanics to maintain machinery purchased in the northeast.

Mechanics from the Dalton area and nearby Chattanooga began adapting sewing machines for the purpose of inserting raised yarn tufts, and in the early s many of the spread houses moved toward becoming spread mills, or factories. Spread mill owners employed a largely female work force to operate the sewing machines that now created the raised patterns. By the end of the s, a number of these firms had begun to experiment with multi-needle machines that could tuft wider swaths of backing material more quickly.

Some firms, such as the cleverly named Cabin Crafts to conjure the image of a cottage industry that already had ceased to exist had begun making small rugs by covering the entire surface of a piece of backing material with tufts.

Hosiery mill mechanics like Albert and Joe Cobble founded firms in the southern industrial dynamo of Chattanooga, Tennessee less than 30 miles from Dalton to build special machines for the tufted bedspread and small rug industry.

From these technological roots, area entrepreneurs began experimenting with making large rugs and wall-to-wall carpeting with this tufting process. About , the Cobble Brothers firm and an innovative Dalton spread making company, Cabin Crafts, introduced tufting machinery wide enough to produce carpeting in a single pass.

Carpet makers could buy cheap pre-woven backing materials. Manufacturers tried cotton with mostly poor results. Eventually Indian jute became the primary backing material for tufted carpets through the s. In the s, manufacturers developed suitable synthetic substitutes for jute.

The traditional woven carpet industry primarily used wool. The new southern tufting mills used cotton yarn at first. Cotton did not compare with wool as a floor covering material — it crushed easily and wore more quickly. Yet already by , southern carpet mills were selling more carpets than northern mills, in spite of the clearly inferior nature of the product. The key was price: the wholesale price of tufted carpet was about half that of woven products.

Consumer surveys in the s demonstrated that few carpet buyers could name the manufacturer of the carpets they had purchased. The same consumers were almost without exception unable to distinguish between a tufted and a woven construction with a visual inspection. The tufted carpet industry experienced a meteoric rise in the s, but many skeptics saw it as a fad that would fade. The obvious inferiority of cotton made the argument plausible. Surely consumers, many in the old woven industry argued, would eventually tire of placing glorified bedspreads on their floors.

Tufted manufacturers experimented with rayon disastrously and staple chopped, spun nylon with some success in the s. The most significant breakthrough in terms of raw materials came in the mids from the DuPont Corporation. DuPont helped insure that the bust never came by developing bulked continuous filament BCF nylon in the mids. DuPont even helped the new industry along by launching its own ad campaign for carpets made with its trademark nylon in the late s and early s.

Seven to eight tufts per inch is a good number, while three or four is pretty poor. Face weight is determined by the actual amount of fiber per square yard, and is measured in ounces.

A typical carpet may have a face weight of 35 to 45 ounces for example. Finally, density is a measure of how tightly the yarn is stitched into the primary backing. Higher density carpet will typically wear better than low density carpet. The first method of dyeing is called yarn dyeing, or sometimes pre-dyeing, where the color is applied to the yarn prior to tufting. The advantages of all yarn dyeing methods include good side-by-side color consistency, large lot sizes, and uniformity.

The second method involves applying color to the yarn after the carpet has been tufted. This method is called carpet dyeing. There are several carpet dyeing methods in use, each producing a unique end result. The first technique, often referred to as Beck, or batch dyeing, involves stitching the ends of the carpet together, and then running the tufted carpet loop through large vats of dye and water for several hours. The Beck process is ideal for smaller production runs, and heavier face weight products.

Continuous dyeing is a similar process to Beck dyeing, but involves running the carpet through several processes in addition to just the dye application. Continuous dyeing applies the color directly to the carpet face by spraying or printing. This process is also used to create multicolor or patterned effects in the carpet. Screen printing is another common method of carpet coloring, where color is applied through anywhere from one to as many as eight silk-screens. The major benefits of carpet dyeing, that is dyeing the carpet after the tufting process, are greater color flexibility, and lower cost.

This process is typically a single production line that completes the final stage of the carpet construction. Secondary backing is typically made of a woven synthetic polypropylene material.

The two parts are squeezed together in a large heated press, where they are held firmly to preserve their shape.