We’re happy to announce that in 2019 we recycled 7,951,271 pounds of fired porcelain, bringing our company’s cumulative recycling total to nearly 134 million pounds since the 2009 launch of the Tile Take-Back® program and subsequent TOTO USA recycling partnership. Our innovative recycling initiatives make us the standard bearer for sustainability in the domestic tile industry and offer the ultimate assurances for specifiers who chose to create projects that lead in all things ‘green.’
These recycling initiatives are based on our 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. Through our TOTO partnership, we receive 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 134 million cumulative pounds of the recycled material Crossville has diverted from landfills have been—or soon 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 an eighth consecutive year. Net waste consumption is achieved by using more waste than is created during production.
Here’s the break-out of our total of 7,951,271 pounds of fired porcelain recycled in 2019.
- 4,560,984 pounds fired scrap product at the company’s plant
- 3,261,860 pounds of TOTO’s scrap porcelain
- 128,427 pounds of post-consumer waste from the Tile Take-Back® program
Additionally, in 2019, Crossville removed 2,323,046 pounds of filtrate solids from dirty water and recycled back into tile production.
Tile Take-Back® and the TOTO USA partnership are just two of many sustainable practices Crossville maintains companywide. For more information about all of Crossville’s sustainability practices, visit https://www.crossville.com/sustainability/overview/.
