A 37 percent carpet recycling rate in 1 state stands against 9 percent for the rest of the country, but the pounds it actually collected have been falling for three years

Pick up a three foot offcut of old carpet and the weight is wrong.

It feels like a rolled towel and it lifts like a sandbag.

Something in there is much denser than fiber, and it is not the pile you can see.

A truck can fill up on volume long before it fills up on tonnage, or the other way round, depending on what it collected.

Which is a clue about why the number everyone quotes for this material is doing something odd.

What the rate divides by is not a measurement

You would expect a carpet recycling rate to be pounds recycled over pounds collected.

It is not.

The state program divides pounds of recycled output by pounds of estimated discards, and discards are not weighed anywhere. They are calculated.

The formula starts with square yards sold in the state, multiplies by an assumed replacement rate and density, then adds allowances for demolition and for carpet pulled up early.

So sales drive the denominator.

When sales fall, the estimated pile of discarded carpet falls with them, and a recycler who collects exactly the same tonnage as last year scores higher without changing anything at all.

What is actually inside the roll

The weight puzzle from the intro has a specific answer.

By federal modeling, a short ton of carpet is roughly 45 percent face fiber, about 15 percent woven polypropylene backing, 8 percent latex adhesive, and 32 percent limestone, ground and packed into the latex as filler.

A product declaration from one large mill puts it at 35 percent.

So a third of the mass is powdered rock, put there because it is cheap and it makes the backing stiff.

That is also why the material resists recycling. The filler and the latex contaminate the fiber and are hard to get off it, and the one genuinely valuable fraction, nylon, is buried under the two least valuable ones.

The four years of numbers side by side

Here is the sequence, and it is the whole argument.

Carpet sold in the state fell from 67.3 million square yards to 53.1 million in three years, a drop of more than a fifth.

Collection did not rise to match the reported progress. It ran 84.0 million pounds, then 79.0, then 82.7, then 78.5 million.

Recycled output went 73.6 million pounds, then 66.1, then 74.9, then 67.4.

The reported rate over those same years went 33.9 percent, 35, 38.5, and then 37.

Read the two columns together. The most recent year collected less carpet and recycled less of it than the first year, and still reports a rate almost four points higher.

Three things that sit awkwardly with the headline

The first is direction. The latest figure of 37 percent is not a record. It is down from 38.5 the year before, and it lands exactly on the target rather than above it, with a 45 percent goal due by the end of next year.

The second is the regulator. The state agency reviewed the previous annual report and found it noncompliant, with two of thirteen plan goals missed and a third missed narrowly, which rarely travels with the recycling rate in coverage of it.

The third is the comparison itself. That 9 percent for the rest of the country is a federal estimate for a single year, it is the last such estimate published, and the same series shows 5.2 percent three years earlier, so it is not a flat line anybody is holding steady. The industry group’s own last national report put it at 5 percent instead, which is the mark of a figure closer to a measurement artifact than to a count, while the same state runs a mattress program whose rate is built from weighed tonnage.

The two rates are not the same metric. One is recycled output over modeled discards for carpet alone. The other is recycling over municipal waste generation, counting rugs and padding, with burning counted separately at nearly 18 percent, per the federal tables and the state’s published goals.

What the fee on every square yard actually buys

None of this is an argument that the program achieves nothing at all.

It went from a nickel a square yard at the start to about a dollar now for broadloom and nearly a dollar and a half for carpet tile, and that money is what makes collection happen at all.

Where that money goes is the interesting part.

Roughly 27 percent of everything counted as recycled in the most recent full year was the limestone filler. The program pays 17 cents a pound to have that taken away and reused, against about 2 cents a pound for quarried limestone.

Cumulatively, 148 million pounds of that same recovered filler has gone back into a landfill anyway.

So the honest summary is not that the rate is fake. It is that a rate built on a shrinking denominator rewards a falling market, and that the fraction doing most of the lifting is the one worth the least money.