Mohawk Ceramic: Manufacturing Without Waste

Our Plants & Processes Decrease Water Usage While Reusing Fired Tile

Mohawk Ceramic offers a broad array of products from floor tiles to mosaics. It’s what happens while manufacturing this beautiful product that makes it an eco–friendly flooring choice.

Mohawk manufactured ceramic tile is green for many reasons, but most amazing is that three of the tile manufacturing plants produce not one drop of process waste water. Our other manufacturing plants recycle and reuse as much of the process waste water as possible. In 2006 alone, more than 64 million gallons of waste water were recovered and reused.

During the last few years, Mohawk Ceramic Manufacturing made significant efficiency improvements to the manufacturing process:

• Newer fuel–efficient equipment
• Decreased downtime with kiln loading
• Turning off burners
• Lighting changed to high–performance T8 fluorescent bulbs
• Office occupancy sensors installed
• The resulting energy savings from these equal enough natural gas to fuel more than 6,000 homes and enough electricity to service more than 1,700 homes for an entire year

Virtually all Mohawk ceramic tile manufacturing processes use by–products from internal and/or external manufacturing. For example, what was previously a waste stream from another manufacturing process functions as raw material for making the majority of our floor tile products. In 2006, reusing this type of waste material kept more than 98 million tons of waste out of landfills.

In addition, Mohawk reused nearly 35 million pounds of internally generated waste fired tile to make new wall tile products. As a result of reusing these former waste materials, the use of raw material such as clay, shale, and other rock–like minerals (even though they are abundantly available) is kept to a minimum.

Depending on the product, the recycled material make–up of the ceramic can be as high as 47 percent. Currently, Mohawk is working to develop a porcelain floor tile that will contain post–consumer recycled material content.

While our processes reuse as much of the waste fired tile as possible, there are times it can’t be reused. If that’s the case, the waste fired tile is provided for use in state–approved beneficial reuse projects or other aftermarket applications. Last year, these types of projects diverted nearly 30 million pounds of material from landfills.

Others may say they have "green" products and processes, but at Mohawk Ceramic Manufacturing we don’t just talk about what we’re planning to do — we can talk about what we’ve already done for the environment and what we’re doing for it every day.