America's carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy
apnews.com
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Dalton makes something like 70-80% of the carpet in the world. They've had carpet factories there since I was a kid, but they're starting to expand into lots of other industries.
They've begun massively ramping up on solar panel production, for instance.
It used to be the only city between Chattanooga and Cobb County (in the Atlanta metro), but now factories have sprung up throughout the I-75 corridor from Acworth to Calhoun. And they're putting them up at breakneck pace.
You can easily see all the factories on a satellite view. Just look at the I-75 corridor [1].
The folks working in these factories are making good money. They're able to afford 2,000 square foot homes in the rural towns they live in.
This little city is doing $10B in GDP. It's impressive if you've ever driven through there.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@34.6185909,-84.9776839,50698m/d...
And all they had to do to accomplish this, apparently, was make their environment toxic. What a bargain.
This "treatment land" is literally adjacent to a river, which flows into Alabama... and becomes multiple other MSA's drinking supply. This interstate conflict is what first brought PFAs to national attention. Thank god it doesn't flow to my watersource, but that's naïve thinking it doesn't carryover in the winds, waters, fauna.
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>The scale of manufacturing there is wild.
It's primarily due to two things: lack of regulations (see: PFAs), subpar compensation (our "right to work" Southern Pride). There are practically no local IT jobs (handful of poorly-compensated churners), and most of the tech-elite around here work from home (25gbps fiber, asynch, to your door).
Volkswagon has silo'd their third-shift as we brace for the inevitable economy we deserve.
But the CEO in the intro just seems like an odd choice. PFAS were known to cause issues for a long time, if you continued to use them for years then it is in your back too.
Being "surprised" this might eventually affect your own product line just seems naive. You might have trusted 3M but just blindly trusting a supplier is not an excuse at some point.
Isn't it all of us with carpets in our homes that are affected? (Albeit to a lesser degree—but also we are at the least partners in this if our buying carpets are destroying these other people's communities.)
Your carpet doesn’t contain enough PFAS to create dangerous runoff and contaminate groundwater or entire rivers, but a town that manufactures most of the world’s mass produced carpeting is going to generate industrial amounts of pollution in a concentrated area.
Has this actually been confirmed, or is this just the precautionary principle in action?
See table 1
>The toxicity of PFAS to humans has been linked to several health-related issues such as breast cancer,80 infertility,81 vitamin D deficiency,82 increased cholesterol,83 diabetes,84 altered metabolism,85 thyroid toxicity,86 atherosclerosis,87 osteoporosis,88 and cardiovascular diseases.61 Individually, various PFAS and their associated health-related issues are summarised in Table 1.
It's like saying that you're not responsible for stealing a wallet because you didn't know exactly how much was in it.
The question of responsibility is of course not what we were talking about, but rather whether the statement "PFAS were known to cause issues" was in fact true. Too often we see possibility of harm being deliberately conflated with actually causing harm. Is it too much to ask for some honesty here?
Comparing them betrays a complete ignorance of the molecular properties that, in combination with biological system processes, make A and B6 healthy at small doses and poisonous at large doses on one hand, and those that makes PFAS linearly poisonous at any given doses on the other. (And yes, you can be exposed to small amounts of toxins and be fine. That doesn’t change the toxicity of a given substance.)
Struggling to see how this could be anything but a bad faith argument.
Compounded on top of that is because although you can dye the polyester before it is extruded, this is the firm minority of carpet produced. Maybe a quarter or less? Usually you will dye it before spinning it into yarn or before tufting it (weaving it into the backing basically). However, it is often cheaper especially for solid carpet to essentially dunk the whole finished carpet into a vat for dyeing, or run it through a glorified conveyor belt to do much the same. I’d hazard a decent guess that the latter two methods are the worst offenders for pollution for obvious reasons. What’s a bit of a pity then is that it seems to me that this isn’t really inevitable (although if we stop entirely that’s a perfect recipe for some other country to undercut us even if they inherit the long term dangers too).
With that said, the CRI (Carpet and Rug Institute) is almost the epitome of what you’d imagine an industry group to be. And 3M/DuPont are, well, you know. So I’m sure the article doesn’t really exaggerate there.
Finally I’d say that the upshot for all of us should be that regulation and pressure work. There was a calculation made whether intentionally or not, explicitly or implicitly, that if this came out to be bad then the big chemical companies could be blamed (and could further be reliably counted on to have engaged in outright unethical activity that makes blaming them a somewhat valid strategy too).
Source: sold carpet for a few years and was actually curious about the industry unlike many of my peers
The treatments like stain master are/were the problem, not the dye.
Carpet is a wonderful product, even polys. It’s good we’re having a conversation about it, but vinyl flooring has far out passed carpet , and it is full of awful carcinogens, made in china, not disclosed, secret recipes. But , it can be unstable and release into your home / office / work place
It doesn’t surprise me that Dalton Utilities operated poorly and appears to have been in cahoots with the carpet companies to cover up the risk. Dalton is a place where education isn’t always valued but relationships are. Plus, carpet is the back bone of the economy there — issues with carpet impact the community heavily, making it difficult for anyone to stand in its way.
There’s a real sense of fear and helplessness in the community there as this information comes out.
It’s a lesson in the dangers of unregulated capitalism, but it only matters if we’re paying attention. There’s a role for government to support and protect citizens from companies whether it’s PFAs or AI.
Frankly the carpet factories will do more business as people will want to replace their carpets more frequently.
It sucks that it is this way, but society seems to have largely accepted it
For individuals: arrest, jail, prison, and horrifically crippling fines are normal.
An individual kills 1 person, and its 15y to life. But if youre an 'insurance company' and make policies in abeyance of insurance and arbitrarily deny 30% of claims getting many killed (Luigi says hi), thats perfectly fine. Youre a business leader making lots of money.
You steal $100 from the till at $shitretailjob and company calls cops and has you arrested. BUT if they fraudulently change timesheets and steal $100 from you, wellllll thats a civil matter.
Or, a company made 1B dollars but spent $990M, they only owe taxes on 10M$. But if I make $100k and spent $90k, I still pay taxes on 100k, not 10K.
This country should be called the Corporate States of America. That fiction has more rights than I or any other non-billionaire average human will ever have.
Who knows a country in which is different, let me know, please, honestly.
Before people turn to Reddit-style downvoting and flagging, this isn't a vouch for China as a country on the whole. It has plenty of other problems that certain Western countries don't have. I'm simply talking about the specific topic at hand.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398603137_Global_in...
Trump is waging war on the EPA.
Just to give one example, look up the crackdown on Alibaba and platform monopolies. You also mentioned Jack Ma. The Ant Group IPO he was pushing, was likely to be a bad thing for most of Chinese society.
Other notable non-Trumpist example is Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest. He refused to comply with a request for phone records without a warrant. The reaction was a drop in Federal business and a prosecution for insider trading.
Im not going to list factoids of what rank we are or arent. Its honestly irrelevant. Im stuck here, since I have no familial claim of citizenship elsewhere.
So, yeah. I speak out here and in person, about these abuses.
Eventually, we'll do better. Takes time. Probably longer than I have alive.
Which is everyone, since everyone has their pension invested in a giant pool made of of unethical companies that we can't fine, ban or let fail because it would destroy people's retirements who will then vote in an angry way to reverse this, or it will destroy some upstream national important industries that are very well regulated, or lobby very well, like Purdue pharma.
It's a collective fault, not that of only a handful of people.
Or I guess you could get there by abolishing the stock market as it exists, which seems more likely.
In another world, there could have been NO impact at all to human beings and PFAS could be just another random chemical the body doesn't clear but doesn't actually do anything and sits there inert.
I know everyone's pissed about this but the thyroid/other connections stuff happens 10 years later as a result and these are idiot business people playing in waters they don't understand (and neither did medicine at that time). You could say, "you can't take the risk." For me these questions are maybe we need to take a deeper/closer look at what are permissible risks and at what point.
But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistence. No chemo because it will cause damage and death. People want there to be a Dr. Eggman or Hitler in this story because it's turned out to be so impactful. Like Aesbestos which solved for fire, just poorly - carpet was solving for comfort, sound deadening, and emotional well being. We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
It's fantastic that science continually grows in understanding and can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems. "How evil children playing with matches" are though, is asking the wrong question. These people were stupid enough to say - "there's cancer in rats, lets just keep going".
True, but if you contaminate water, and people, with chemicals not supposed to be there; I feel the burden should be on you to prove the chemicals are not harmful.
> you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever
No you couldn't - the measures taken to prevent contamination were inadequate, they could've innovated while also following the rules. And if not, no business is owed a viable business model, certainly a random strangers heath isn't worth the price of profiting from easy-to-clean carpets.
> We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.
Quantify what?
> can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems
we (or America) have a whole system of classifying chemicals as safe for human consumption or not. Whatever was thought about PFAS, I don't believe they had been proven safe enough to dump into drinking water?
I understand the argument you are making, and I'm no fan of govt/regulations, but you will notice that often basic testing of toxicity/side effects is missing or the system is gamed.
One example I recently came across: antidepressant drugs are tested on people for around 12 weeks and then labeled safe if there are no side effects or reversible side effects. To summarize: profits overrides and safety concerns.
Do people really speak like that?
It's the banality of evil over and over again. Can't really blame the individual, with some extreme exceptions, otherwise by calling people out as you are doing you are participating in perpetuating the problem without contributing with anything new.
Also(I'm absolutely not taking corporate side here), she says, "I feel like, I don’t know, almost like there’s a blanket over me, smothering me that I can’t get out from under." because of PFAS levels but then look at the corporate products/chemicals she covers her body in daily, and accepts money from others to do the same. If you are going to be outraged, at least be consistent about it.
I (and others) need to be educated about it first. I know, for example, the risks of cigarettes because it is on every pack in the U.S.
We need a corporate death penalty. Probably combined with something that will put the fear of God in anyone who thinks only along the axis of profit.
EDIT: grammer
I agree that cookie banners shouldn’t exist - but too many companies love to collect and sell my personal data so that is their current workaround. I would love for the EU regulation to clamp down on this as well but it’s a never ending process.
The banners were devised by the adtech conoanies as a way they though could bypass the GDPR, in the most anti-user way possible. But "allow all" was easy.
Its also likely those banners arent even legal to begin with.
This whole cookie banner law is an example of horrible co panies will act in order to subvert the letter and spirit of laws.
Again, harsher regulation is only "harsher" if it's purely reductive or increases the burden right. Indoor synthetic fiber carpets might not be the best example here, but something like health insurance is more easy to grok.
For the sake of the article though I'll try with carpets. If we issued regulations that said "no more companies making indoor carpeting that pollutes our environments and poisoned people" then used those resources elsewhere like encouraging sheep farming and carpet making, you would be to mitigate the pollution while not depriving people of their floor coverings.
Now, that sounds really boring and potentially a waste of time, right?
Well, yes, and no, and yes!
Well it's complicated!
I would speculate (being horrendously undereducated on the subject!) that there probably exist a set of chemical processes which could create Carpets without any harmful environmental waste or residual chemicals which subsequently require disposal.
What these would be or could be, I as-of-yet do not know...
It's a subject that needs research... a lot of research... lots and lots of research!
But, while it might sound like a really boring, uninteresting, "there's nothing to see here" kind of goal, keep in mind this quote from the article:
>"Mohawk logged more than $3.4 billion in net sales. Shaw Industries reported $4.2 billion."
Yup, the global carpet market is worth... (wait for it!)... "Billion$"!
So -- an interesting problem for present and future Scientists/Chemists! Crack it (in whole or in part!) and your solution or partial solution could be worth Billion$!
I mean, I'd put that up against a Clay Millennium Prize for solving a complex Math problem, I'd put that against a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal or Dirac Medal or Feynman Prize!
Yup, solve The Carpet Chemistry Problem(tm) (let's give it a name!) -- and your share of Billion$ (as Carl Sagan would say!) could be yours! :-)
(I now will humbly submit this post for the obligatory yes-I-know-they-are-coming downvotes! :-) )
The problem is with the manufacturers being evil, selfish environmental nightmares.
Domestic manufacturing has a lot of advantages from the standpoint of total pollution. I guarantee you that even with lax American environmental rules, the pollution caused by a factory in Georgia is still lower and less hazardous to workers and the surrounding community than if the same factory were in India. Furthermore, our government is at least theoretically capable of adding better protections for workers and communities, while our government is going to have a hard time enforcing pollution rules overseas.
I don't think you are racist or xenophobic. I just think that when people make this argument they don't think about the fact that this stuff is still getting manufactured somewhere if it's not made here, and basically the complaint is that Americans are having to deal with the consequences rather than people in other countries.
https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...
Whether I intend to work a factory job or not I can still decide that unemployment in the U.S., especially unemployment of blue-collar workers, would be better served by local industry than allowing for homelessness or a dependency on welfare. Never mind that there might also be national security issues addressed by local manufacture.
The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.
Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.
If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.
The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.
Still it's supply and demand issue. The west has had 20-30 years of grooming the youth that going to college is the right path to middle class lifestyle and blue collar jobs are for losers who are too stupid to study. You can't be shocked when the supply demand reverses. South Park even had an episode mocking this, with plumbers being the new tech bros, and tech bros being unemployed.
> but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them
Same applies within white collar jobs too. Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible, instead of pushing JSONs to the cloud, even if that's not more complicated than the other.
Ha ha, the giddy feeling a software engineer feels when they write a few lines of assembly on a Motorola 68HC11 and get an LED to turn on…
You should talk to the people of Dalton. They're really proud of it. The first thing they tell you is they're from the "carpet capital of the world". Without fail they will mention that to you. It's so ingrained that it's part of their identity.
I don't think they'd be happy to lose their jobs for knowledge work or anything else.
I see no issue with that statement. Without blue collar work what are the job prospect for those who can't become an AI engineer or a quant in London other than live on the dole or become homeless crack addict?
This is a silly statistic that manipulative people drag out to imply the answer that they want. If you asked people who work in factories right at this second, 75% of them would say that they didn't want to work in a factory. If you ask people who work any job, and ask if they would rather not be working, 75% would say yes.
It kind of goes with the weird idea that illegal immigrants actually love to clean toilets and work in fields for slave wages.
> when I ask “so you’d prefer to work in a factory?”
...to your upper-middle class friends who make six figures.
Have you ever worked in a factory? I find the people most enthusiastic about manufacturing are the ones least likely to have stood at a station in a factory performing manufacturing "work" - the vast majority of which is mind-numbingly boring and repetitive yet with minimal opportunities for passing the time with idle social interaction or chit-chat. Of all the non-professional work I've done, it was easily the least enjoyable. Even if it paid a bit less and demanded more physically, unskilled construction work was enjoyable in comparison. Even kitchen portering provided more stimulation - at least there was plenty of social interaction. This romanticization of factory work is weird.
"I really hate going into the office because I don't want to have to socialize with my coworkers, I just want to be able to do my work and be done with my day."
Japan has had to heavily import workers to keep its factories and service jobs staffed, and the Japanese hate immigration more than MAGA does. The other solution is automation, which is how China plans to deal with its demographic cliff, I guess we could import factory robots from China.
The Civil war never banned slavery. It only banned private citizens from owning people. The government (state and federal) kept sole right to still own people.
The only gate is found guilty of a crime. Technically, that can even be for a speeding ticket. And when they can keep prosecuting for a laundry list, they effectively guarantee a win against whomever they want.
I don't know where the flaw in the logic was but I think the idea was first you have to become wealthier and with more money comes a better quality of life.
Using an AI answer as a jumping off point, it looks like the possible harms are:
• Higher cholesterol — (Strong)
• Reduced vaccine antibody response — (Strong)
• Pregnancy‑induced hypertension / preeclampsia — (Strong)
• Lower birth weight / impaired fetal growth — (Strong)
• Kidney cancer (PFOA) — (Contested)
• Testicular cancer (PFOA) — (Limited)
• Thyroid disease — (Limited)
• Liver enzyme changes / fatty liver risk — (Limited)
• Immune issues beyond vaccines (asthma, infections) — (Emerging)
• Diabetes / metabolic effects — (Emerging)
• Neurodevelopmental / behavioral effects — (Emerging)
• Other cancers (breast, prostate, etc.) — (Inconclusive)
Obviously, this isn’t verified research, but I wanted to know what the concrete risks actually were since at this moment, it seems like most of us are probably stuck with the PFAS already in our environment and bodies.