Last year I had the privilege of attending the US Green Building Council’s 2006 Greenbuild Conference and seeing, among other wonders, Shaw Industries’ amazing Ecoworx carpet.

Just like any other carpet, you lay it down and use it for years (it’s available in tiles so you can replace the most-used portions without re-carpeting the whole house), but when you need to replace it you simply pull it up, dial the toll-free number printed on the back and arrange for it to be picked up.

This is the cool part and I got to see a demonstration of it given by a Shaw lab techie. They dissolve the old carpet in an organic solvent which isn’t consumed by the process or flushed down the drain or evaporated off into the atmosphere. The resulting plasticy goo is then allowed to reharden, chopped up and pulled back out into fibers to reweave into new carpet.

There is no loss (except from wear at the home) of either the carpet material or the solvent and the process can be repeated infinitely. The techie I talked to said she had performed the transformation on one sample 27 times in a row with no hitches!

Better yet, Shaw worked to make this carpet with William McDonough (one of my heroes), who made sure that the ingredients used would not off-gas and would contain no substances that would be toxic alone or combined.

For more on the Cradle-To-Cradle concept, look here. And for a great video of a lecture William McDonough gave on Cradle-To-Cradle design, look at this.