Most event carpet is thrown away after one show. Here is what actually happens to ours — how it comes up, why the staples matter, and how much of it goes back into new carpet.
A trade show floor gets laid on Monday and pulled on Thursday. For most of the carpet in most halls in this country, Thursday night ends in a dumpster. It does not have to, and this is what we do with ours instead.
Event carpet has a brutally short life. It is installed for a show that runs three or four days, it gets walked on by thousands of people, and then it comes up. Because it is cheap per square foot and because pulling it is messy work, the normal end of the story is a roll-off container behind the convention center. Nobody writes that down anywhere, which is exactly why it keeps happening.
The material itself is not the problem. Event carpet is plastic. Plastic is recyclable. The problem is that recycling it takes an extra step at the worst possible moment — during strike, at night, against a move-out deadline, with a crew that is already tired. If your flooring vendor has not planned that step in advance, it does not happen.
Here is the part that gets skipped in most sustainability talk, because it is unglamorous and specific.
Event carpet is held down with staples, and staples are metal. Metal cannot go into a plastics reprocessor. So when we pull a floor, we do not just roll it up and hope. The seams — the lines where two widths meet and where the staples sit — get cut out and set aside. Staples are then pulled by hand out of the large open field area, the wide middle of the room where there is nothing but carpet. Step wraps, the pieces that get cut and folded around stairs and platforms, come out too.
What is left is clean material with no metal in it. That is what gets baled and shipped. The seam lines and step wraps are the loss, and they are roughly ten percent of the floor.
We run two lines that both get reclaimed, and they do not end up in the same place.
Recycled Event Carpet starts as plastic bottles collected here in the United States. The bottles are processed into rPET fiber and the fiber is made into finished carpet at an American plant. After your event we reclaim the floor and send it back to be reprocessed into new carpet for future events. About eighty percent of it goes back into new carpet. The remaining twenty percent is replaced with new recycled PET bottles, so the next roll off the line is still made from reclaimed material.
It is a genuine closed loop, and it is the reason we can put this line under a booth as a turf substitute and still give the exhibitor an honest answer about where the floor came from and where it went.
Fine Lines is a ribbed flat carpet built for heavy show traffic, in polypropylene, and it comes up the same way. Its second life is different: reclaimed Fine Lines gets reprocessed into injection-molded parts rather than back into carpet. Roughly ninety percent of what we lay comes back, with that same ten percent lost to seam lines and step wraps.
Different destination, same discipline on the floor. The staples still have to come out either way.
Over eleven months we reclaimed two hundred fifty tons of carpet that would otherwise have been thrown away. That is the whole argument, and it is a number rather than a slogan.
If you need it for a report, we can give you recycling documentation for your event — useful when a venue, a corporate sustainability team, or an RFP asks what happened to the flooring. Ask for it when you book, not after strike, because the documentation follows the material.
Two minutes and fourteen seconds, from bottles to a finished floor, through strike and baling, and back into new carpet.
From American plastic bottles to a finished floor, through strike and baling, and back into new carpet — the whole loop, start to finish.
Whether or not you ever call us, these are the questions that separate a real recycling program from a line in a brochure.
Tell us the room, the dates and the city. We install nationwide out of Baton Rouge, Nashville and Orlando, and we take the carpet back when the show is over.
Most event carpet is thrown away after a single show. Ours is reclaimed instead. The crew cuts out the seam lines where the staples sit, pulls the remaining staples from the large open field area of the floor, and bales the clean material for reprocessing. Roughly ten percent is lost to seam lines and step wraps.
About eighty percent of our Recycled Event Carpet goes back into new carpet, with the remaining twenty percent replaced by new recycled PET bottles. For Fine Lines, our ribbed flat carpet, roughly ninety percent of what we lay comes back and is reprocessed into injection-molded parts. Over eleven months we reclaimed two hundred fifty tons.
Staples are metal and a plastics reprocessor cannot take metal. If the staples are not removed the load gets rejected, which is why the seams are cut out and the staples are pulled by hand from the field area before anything is baled.
Yes. We can provide recycling documentation for your event for sustainability reporting, venue requirements or RFP responses. Ask for it when you book, because the documentation follows the material.
