CRI’s Frank Hurd Carries Carpet Recycling Message to Great Britain

The Colonel and the Prince - Here at the Carpet and Rug Institute, we call Vice-President Frank Hurd “the Colonel” because he is a real-life retired U.S. Army Colonel who, during his 27-year career in service, commanded a battalion of tanks and served as the U.S. Army liaison to the U.S. Senate. At CRI, Frank shows the same kind of multi-talented leadership in his roles as Chief Operating Officer and Director of Government Affairs, and also as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Carpet America Recovery Effort, otherwise known as CARE. CARE is a joint industry-government effort that focuses on increasing the amount of recycling and reuse of post-consumer carpet and reducing the amount of waste carpet going to landfills.

Frank’s role as CARE Board Chairman recently took him to England for the first annual meeting of Carpet Recycling UK, the British version of CARE. While he was there, Frank also attended a meeting of The Prince of Wales’s Business & The Environment Programme, which is part of the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Sustainability Leadership. At the first meeting, Frank was the featured speaker, and at the second, he rubbed elbows with The Man Who Would Be (Will Be?) King.

For an organization that is only about two years old, Frank said he was impressed with the standing-room-only crowds at the first-ever annual meeting of Carpet Recycling UK, which was held June 23,2009 at Leicester, England. “It was exciting to see their enthusiasm – they were really engaged in solving their problems,” Frank said.

Frank made a presentation (see below) about CARE’s success at creating value from recovered post-consumer carpet, and on how the organization accomplished the major milestone of recovering more than 1 billion pounds of carpet in the last five years. He also stressed the importance of developing market outlets for new products made with recycled materials. (For some examples of U.S. products headed to market, see my blogpost about the CARE annual conference.)

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CARE - Carpet America Recovery Act

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Carpet recycling in the U.K. faces many of the same issues confronting the U.S., Frank says, such as a difficult path to economic viability and the logistics of setting up collection networks, but it also has some additional problems all its own. For example, many English carpets are made with a difficult-to-recycle wool/nylon blend; carpets tend to be lower pile in the U.K., making fiber recovery harder and more expensive. Finally, the bitumen-based backings often used on modular carpet tiles in England are difficult for recyclers to work with, Frank says.

Frank Hurd and fellow CARE Board member Sean Ragiel

share their carpet recycling expertise with members of Carpet Recycling UK

I am not surprised at the packed house and high-energy participation for Carpet Recycling UK’s first big meeting, because I’ve met the group’s executive director, a young woman named Kate Chappell, whom you will hear more about later on the CRI blog.

After the Carpet Recycling UK meeting, Frank traveled to London to be part of an international meeting on climate change. Organized by Cambridge University, the meeting was attended by Prince Charles, as part of his widespread environmental interests. Frank first participated in one of the Prince of Wales’s Business & Environment meetings in 2003, when the group met in the United States. Frank decided to attend again this year because, “This issue will have a tremendous effect on our industry and understanding as many different perspectives as we can is always beneficial.”

Frank had the opportunity to speak to Prince Charles for a few minutes about the work being done in carpet recycling. He said the Prince was, “Very gracious and engaging, with a good sense of humor and a firm handshake.” He said it is obvious the Prince is genuinely interested in sustainability.

Frank is back home, organizing CRI and looking after carpet industry issues on this side of the Atlantic. Luckily for us, he’s still “the Colonel”, cocktails with royalty notwithstanding.

Bethany

Added 8/9/09: Meeting Prince Charles a 'pretty heady experience' by Jamie Jones, Dalton Daily Citizen, published 8/8/09.

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