Where to get Used Carpet for Free

There are lots of places to get used carpet, but when money is short, where can you find it for free?  That is what I wanted to know, as I was doing a home improvement project that needed approximately 600 sf of carpet and I was not willing to pay for it. It’s not that I’m cheap, but what I needed it for did not call for plush carpet in the latest color.

A few weeks ago I decided to put a pond in my backyard.  After moving some very large shrubs and trees, I built a couple of retaining walls and dug the hole where to pond was going to go. Before putting the pond liner in, I wanted to put some padding under it to protect it from possible puncture from rocks under the liner.  At my former house I had the kids go around the neighborhood and collect newspapers that I used under a previous pond liner.  It was a great way to recycle newspaper and provided a good padding.

This time around the pond was going to be quite a bit larger and had more rock in the soil so I wanted a more durable padding.  I have a friend in the rock business that swears by using carpet as the padding for ponds so I decided to give it a try.  But where to find it for free. Who has tons of used carpet they are trying to get rid of?   Of course I thought of companies that install carpet, but I did not have a contact and did not want to try to find the right person to talk to so I turned to the company that installs carpet at the Better Living Show.

DWA Trade Show and Exposition Services is the service contractor that decorates all of the large consumer and trades shows in Portland, Oregon. They are the company that put in the booths, exhibit furnishings and aisle carpets in the shows held at the Portland Expo Center. Every year they lay tens of thousands of square feet of carpet in show aisles.  After a few uses that carpeting is repurposed into smaller booth carpets.  And after that?

I asked Patti Beyer, owner of DWA Trade Show and Exposition Services what happens to the carpet after its worn out and cannot be used again.  Her answer was music to my ears.  It is repurposed by a company that cuts it down and uses it to line shipping crates.  A great green solution! And some is used by people that want runners for their garages.  Unfortunately with the economy so slow, the crate business is not using as much carpet. But that also meant she had plenty for me.

Beyer had never been asked for carpet scraps for the purpose of pond liner padding but was happy to see the carpet repurposed for one last use.  And while DWA works mostly in the Pacific Northwest, any town with a major exhibition hall will have a show decorating contractor that more than likely is looking at recycling their old carpet for free.  Give them a call and keep it out of the landfill.