Eco Strategies Drive Mat-maker’s U-turn

Jeffrey Willis, president of Pretty Products, says green is driving innovation at all levels. He credits green strategy and innovation for the turnaround of a company losing $1 million a month into a vibrant, prosperous one.

Starting at the end may seem counterintuitive. You start at the beginning, right? However, zero-waste-to-landfill and other waste-reduction initiatives, life cycle planning, eco strategies, and cradle-to-grave efforts have illuminated the need to design manufacturing processes in reverse order. Ecosavvy manufacturers have recognized a need to design a product by thinking first about what will happen to it when it meets the end of its useful life. Can it be reused or recycled?

When vehicle floor mats manufacturer Pretty Products, LaGrange, Ga., wanted to design an ecofriendly mat, it had a head start. At least 50 percent of the fiber layer in its carpeted mats are made from recycled or reprocessed plastic, such as that of a water bottle. The recycled content certainly contributes a shade of green to its mats, but the company went a shade beyond that by examining its
carpeted mats’ end of life and making it recycle-friendly.

Standard carpeted mats are constructed of the carpet layer, which is then bonded to a primary backing (a thermoplastic olefin with rubber buffings), by a latex layer. Once these standard mats reach their end of useful life, they face the same problems encountered with attempts to recycle layered packaging materials, wax-coated cardboard, and laminated materials. Recycling the individual elements certainly is possible—rubber is recycled regularly and so is carpet—but separating the layers is the sticky wicket. Segregating the carpet from the latex from the rubber backing is difficult, slow, and costly—and therefore, not reasonably feasible, according to the company.

So Pretty Products engineered a way (patent pending) to bind the carpet to its primary backing without latex. In addition, it engineered the primary backing so that the entire mat can be recycled as a contiguous material. The manufacturer calls this its GreenMat™.

The mat’s recyclability is more than theoretical. The manufacturer recycles its carpeted mat offal into raw material for use in its own production of new carpet backing and noncarpeted mats.

Manufacturer Recycles Itself

A carpeted mat starts out as a carpet roll that the company purchases from Dalton, Ga., supplier Dorsett. The manufacturer selects carpet with at least 50 percent recycled content, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from water bottles.

The genesis for the Green Mat was an overall strategy to turn a tired, old company rubber-stamping commodity products into a pretty vibrant, living, breathing company that could solve its customers’ problems while sustaining itself.

It was part of company President Jeffrey Willis’ plan to bring the dying, 1929-founded company back to life with innovative strategies and next-generation solutions, he said.

“When I bought this company four years ago, it was broken. It was losing a million dollars a month,” Willis said. “It had been a great success for a long time, a $160 million company in its heyday, but it didn’t have any real strategies to innovate into the new marketspace. Once they let that get by them, the company fell on its share of difficulties in many ways. (See The Strategy, the Fight, and Emerging Victorious.)

“Two years ago we realized that the market and global society is heading toward environmental stewardship; our strategy was to make our company compelling to that notion. We want to be out in front of that because that’s where it’s going,” Willis said.

Willis added that the company’s pursuit of environmentally friendly products and methods has had a broad effect. “A lot of what has driven our strategy is green. Green has pushed the edges of innovation, so we’ve come up with all kinds of new products and ways of manufacturing.”

That approach has sustained the company as well. “It’s given us a competitive advantage and allowed us to influence our own recovery,” Willis said.

Green From the Bottom Up

Plant Manager Willie Flowers explained how the GreenMat is constructed. “The carpeted floor mat really is made up of four different layers. One is the carpet itself. It comes as a standard-width rolled product from the mill. This fiber layer can be manufactured of any type of reprocessed polyethylene terephthalate [PET], polypropylene, or nylon. We source carpet with 50 percent recycled content, on average.” This carpet is tufted through a secondary backing layer of nylon and then the primary backing is extruded and affixed to the carpet layer in one operation. The backing is made mostly of thermoplastic olefin. It has a recycled component and a colorant.

“The binding agent holds the carpet in place and bonds it to the thermoplastic olefin backing without a latex binder. That is the patented part of the process.” The nonlatex binder and the thermoplastic olefin backing content allow the entire mat to be a 100 percent-recycled product, Flowers said.

“Rubber is recyclable, but when you bind it with latex to the polyester or nylon carpet, then it has to go through a time-consuming, costly separation process before it can be recycled,” Flowers said. While the technology may be available, it is so time- and cost-prohibitive, it rarely is used.

“So we have developed a process to convert rubber-backed, latex-bound carpeted mat to a carpeted mat with an extruded thermoplastic olefin-type backing that is ‘recycle-friendly.'”

Chief Financial Officer John Hawkins added his financial perspective. “What’s critical is that with this process, there’s no more cost to recycle it. So why would you not do it?”

“Folks can drop off these GreenMats in a recycling bin just like any other recyclable plastic. You can’t do that with rubber,” Willis said.

In-Plant Postproduction Waste Recycling

The carpet is joined with its extruded thermoplastic elastomer backing and bonded with a no-latex binder in one operation. By using a nonrubber backing and a nonlatex binder, the company and its customers can recycle the entire mat without cost- and time-prohibitive separation processes.

Once the manufacturer developed its recyclable mat, it looked inward at its own recycling practices. “We put 700 tons of product scrap in landfills in 2009. No longer,” Willis said.

“We developed a way to reuse our offal to divert it from the landfill. In the process, we’ve actually become our own fourth-largest raw material supplier,” Flowers said.

That planned scrap comprises 25 percent of its raw material, Flowers said. So why not just reduce the waste generated? Flowers compares the mat-making process to making a waffle. “If you pour too much batter in a waffle iron and close it down, when you take the waffle out, you’ll have a large crust around the edge that you don’t use. The way we make the floor mats is really similar.

“We run carpet underneath that ‘waffle iron’ and we’ll adhere the backing on it. Then we’ll cut out the configuration of the mat. But the part of the roll that we do not use is kind of like the edge around the waffle,” Flowers said.

The mats’ offal is recycled on-site in a machine custom-designed and -manufactured for Pretty Products and installed in January 2010. Wllis calls it the NGR—next-generation recycling machine. “We needed a way to reprocess the offal and reduce the resin that we were consuming. So I rolled the dice and had this machine built. It was a very important part of the process of going green. It’s highly efficient; it’s made us become more efficient.

“We feed it the backing, the carpet, the binder, everything.” Offal goes up a conveyor into a screw-and-barrel grinder that grinds it as a conglomerate. It is heated, combined with water, melted at about 305 degrees, blended, recolorized, and cut into pellets. The pellets then are dumped into a hopper blender and transported right back into the line to make more backing, Willis said.

“Different waste streams go into the backing, and nylon has a different melting point index than a polypropylene, so we do keep the regrind separate. The composition of the backing is a thermoplastic olefin, and then you have either a nylon or a polypropylene carpet. So we’ll run all of the polypropylene thermoplastic olefin carpet offal at one time, and set that aside, and then anything that has nylon and thermoplastic olefin will run separately,” Flowers said.

Mat Backs = Greenbacks. “Anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of our backing is that regrind—we call it EcoGrind—depending on the type of product,” Flowers said.

“That represents a huge amount of savings. We diverted 602 tons of scrap waste from going to a landfill last year by consuming it ourselves. We eliminated the rubber we were buying, and reduced our inputs,” Willis said.

Hawkins added, “We paid about a half million dollars for a state-of-the-art recycling machine. We then reuse the EcoGrind pellets as a raw material; the equipment paid for itself in less than a year.”

Green Is Footpath to Product Innovation

Gwen Lynch pulls out the front and back, driver’s side and passenger side mats after they are cut in a cookie-cutter-type machine. The postproduction waste, or offal, is routed to the area where it will be recycled on-site.

With green as its compass, the manufacturer opened itself to driving other innovations as well, Willis said.

“Each floor mat has some strategy to respond to some compelling issue or demand with the customer, the industry, or the global environment. It started with the GreenMat,” Willis said. “You have to continue creating new business models which create new revenue and new strategies. That’s a part of differentiating us from our competitors. We need to make cutting-edge, innovative floor mat solutions,” Willis said.

How innovative can a car mat be, you ask? You might be surprised.

The company developed a patented “acoustic” mat for Honda. The open web design allows sound to pass though to dampen road noise.

“This mat is not a standard-commodity mat. It is designed to deal with a compelling issue that a customer had. Honda had interior road noise issues. So we designed this to combat that issue,” Willis said. “And it’s better to respond to that issue with price-efficient products that solve a problem than just providing the low-cost products.”

The company also designed a “passive restraint” floor mat. “We developed this based on a compelling situation of one of our customers,” Willis said. “Based on its load-bearing characteristics and its nib design, the type of carpet that it sits on, and an antirotational feature, what the passive restraint mat does is counterintuitive. When you step on it, it will never go forward; it actually goes the other way. So there will never be a situation that the mat can be accused of advancing toward the accelerator pedal.”

Innovation Sustains Company

Pretty Products now manufactures car mat solutions, Willis said. The collection, which includes four patented or patent-pending products, are serge-binding; nonserge-binding; Colony II; In-Pression all-weather; acoustic (road noise dampening); passive restraint; and its newest, the GreenMat™, which is composed of recycled content and is 100 percent recyclable.

Fueled by the success of recycling its carpeted mat offal, the team turned its attention to its all-weather, noncarpeted mats, which had been made of synthetic rubber in a compression molding machine. “We’ve come up with a way to separate the two plates. We made a different, inexpensive back plate and mounted it in our injection molding press, plus the aluminum nib plate. So we can take an all-weather rubber mat and convert the tooling to make it out of all injection-molded thermoplastic elastomer,” Flowers said.

What gives this process called InPression its green tinge is that its postindustrial waste also is recycled on-site back into the manufacture of a new all-weather mat. “We use the very same thermoplastic elastomer pellets from the all-weather mat offal to go into making new all-weather mats. It’s the very same composition,” Flowers said.

To make matters greener, the thermoplastic elastomer-constructed mat is up to 25 percent lighter than its rubber counterpart, contributing to the automotive industry’s CAFE goals. Also, the state-of-the-art injection molding machines operate with 20 percent greater energy efficiency than the company’s older injection molding machines, according to the OEM.

However, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this conversion from rubber compression molding to thermoplastic elastomer injection molding is less its  environmental impact and more its ability to sustain the company for longevity because of its time savings, cost savings, and weight reduction. “If we’re fixing our company, the fix isn’t complete until the company is sustainable. You have to have a sustainable strategy in order to advance,” Willis said.

“The compression molding of rubber mats is a very lengthy process,” Flowers said. “Using a waffle iron metaphor again … there’s the top and the bottom part. You shoot rubber in, close it down, let it heat for 10 minutes, open it on its hinge, and take the mat out.”

By converting that to an injection-molded process, using thermoplastic elastomer as a substitute for rubber, the manufacturer reduced cycle time to a tenth of its previous time, eliminating the need to use mercurial-priced rubber. “The compression molding of rubber took about 12 minutes to get a full set. Using our new technology, injection molding of thermoplastic elastomer, we get one about every 75 seconds. This is something no one else is doing in the industry,” Flowers said.

The inventive conversion strengthened Pretty Products’ relationships with current customers. The company was able to deliver that Holy Grail of the automotive industry—a 20 percent cost reduction to its customers—especially significant at a time when rubber prices have been increasing.

“Honda’s ecstatic just to not have buyers coming to them almost weekly, saying, ‘We need price increases,'” Hawkins said. “We’ve converted all of the tools that they currently have for rubber compression molding to In-Pression tools for injection molding.”

What’s more, the conversion helped it make inroads into nonautomotive companies such as Club Car and Winnebago.

“So this is what I meant when I said going green is driving innovation at all levels. The old Pretty would never have come up with an In-Pression tool because it didn’t feel any inclination to do so. While we were trying to become a sustainable company, it opened up all these new avenues for efficiencies and revenue,” Willis said.

Other process innovations the TS 16949/ISO 14001-certified manufacturer has implemented include continuous flow and one-piece workflow, culled from Flowers’ extensive background in lean processes.

In addition, the manufacturer is developing a mat process that, if successful, will reduce the electricity its production consumes by 40 percent.

“All this is part of what separates the new Pretty from the old Pretty,” Flowers commented.

“So we want to build the company… and we want to make sure we have good environmental stewardship,” Willis said.

As for the GreenMat, it has been introduced to Pretty Products’ three major customers, and is undergoing the formal automotive industry’s very extensive evaluation and testing phases. Its launch in the marketplace will be much cele-brated, but the paradigm shift it represents and its contribution to the company’s U-turn brings its own rewards.

“Toyota, which at one point might have looked at us as just a floor mat commodity supplier, now is saying, ‘These guys are beginning to innovate and they’re making our product better,'” Willis said. The new approach to manufacturing and the innovation of new products has brought the company visibility in new market segments as well.

After all, as Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Perhaps that includes having others see you with new eyes as well.

Pretty Products, 1513 Redding Drive, LaGrange, GA 30240, 706-884-1711, [email protected], www prettyproductsllc.com.

Photography by Pete Winkel for Green Manufacturer.