A sustainable approach to interior renovations
What’s one way to divert 3,200 pounds from your local landfill? You could recycle more than 99,000 aluminum cans. Or find a second life for more than 750 issues of the Sunday New York Times. Or, you could recycle more than one and a half tons of used carpet from a space at MIT. That’s what the Committee for Renovations and Space Planning (CRSP) renovations team did recently as a pilot test of MIT’s broader program to design out waste through material re-use and recycling.
Led by MIT CRSP Interior Designer Rebecca Leanos and Project Manager Cherie Alexander, the recycling initiative offered a test in progress for new sustainable design and renovation ideas on campus. “When I first started at MIT, I shared that I was interested in sustainable design and we began looking for a place to make an impact,” explains Leanos. In this effort, Leanos and Alexander joined forces and soon learned from the Office of Sustainability (MITOS) about the Mohawk Re-Cover Carpet Recycling Program offered by MIT’s preferred carpet vendor. Through the program, used carpet is collected and recycled by the company, diverting the waste from landfills. “This model demonstrates how many of our current vendors can become partners with us in solving for waste challenges,“ says Assistant Director of the Office of Sustainability Brian Goldberg of the program.
The CRSP team found the right project fit in a renovation in the E25 Life Lab space. Through the program, the old carpet was simply removed, rolled, then collected by Mohawk to be recycled through ReCover, diverting a substantial amount of waste from landfills. “It was a much smoother process than I was anticipating and we’re now talking about how we can roll this out to all of our projects,” says Alexander.
Those projects refer to more than 90 million dollars’ worth of renovation work each year across a vast number of campus buildings. As the amount of carpet in need of replacing varies space by space, Leanos and Alexander have partnered with MIT Recycling Manager Ruth Davis to secure space on campus to house used carpets as they are collected—allowing Mohawk to streamline the number of vehicle trips to collect the carpet and make the project even more sustainable.
“This project is a fantastic model for designing out waste from MIT,” says Goldberg. “Not only has CRSP demonstrated how easily used carpet can be recycled on a major renovation, but they’ve designed this innovation into their team’s workflow for all renovation projects moving forward.”
Moving forward Leanos and Alexander say their team is looking to apply more sustainable design practices beyond carpet recycling in future projects, first by understanding what practices and products MIT already undertakes. “We’re working to collect all that data right now to see where we stand and then how we improve upon that. We’re finding out that in some cases we are already doing sustainable things without realizing we’re doing it,” says Alexander noting that a number of products used in renovations already avoid Red List (toxic) materials.
As efforts move forward, the MIT CRSP Renovations team is also working with places like the Furniture Trust, a Cambridge non-profit that removes and repurposes old furniture—often destined for the landfill—from places like MIT as well as Rheaply an online re-use tool for the MIT community. Leanos notes that this multipronged approach to sustainable practices allows small renovations to add up to big change. “We may think that small projects don't make a big impact, but as they add up the really do make an impact on the MIT community,” she says.