CROSSVILLE – Officials with Crossville Inc., a domestic tile manufacturer, say the company recycled 21,131,930 pounds of fired porcelain in 2016, bringing their cumulative recycling total to just over 91 million pounds since 2009, when they launched the Tile Take-Back program and subsequent Toto USA recycling partnership.
These recycling initiatives are based on the company’s proprietary process for recycling fired porcelain products, including post-consumer materials. Through Tile Take-Back, Crossville is able to recycle previously installed tile collected from its distribution network, as well as scraps that result from tile cutting during installation, sizing or sample creation.
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Through its Toto partnership, Crossville receives pre-consumer fired porcelain toilets that do not meet quality standards; prior to the partnership, these cast-offs were being sent to landfills for disposal, but now they are recycled for use in manufacturing new tile.
All 91 million-plus cumulative pounds of the recycled material Crossville has diverted from landfills have been or will be introduced into the tile production process. This use of recycled material during manufacturing results in Crossville maintaining its status as a net consumer of waste for a sixth consecutive year. Net waste consumption is achieved by using more waste than is created during production.
Here’s the break-out of Crossville’s total of 21,131,930 pounds of fired porcelain recycled in 2016:
- 13,285,116 pounds fired scrap product at the company’s plant (this amount continues to increase from previous years, as the average tile size produced at Crossville’s plants has increased)
- 7,759,400 pounds of Toto’s scrap porcelain
- 87,414 pounds of post-consumer waste from the Tile Take-Back program
Additionally in 2016, Crossville Inc., a 2016 Ovation Award winner, removed 3,107,192 pounds of filtrate solids from dirty water and recycled back into tile production. That’s 1.4 million more pounds than were removed in 2015.
