from Treehugger: reducing carpet sample waste

found this text on Treehugger, who got it from BuildingGreen. Nice!

"Tricycle specializes in creating simulated carpet sample using paper. Currently, designers use real carpet samples in the design process, which is quite wasteful and costly. Tricycle uses a "digital tufting" software that simulates the actual placement of yarn in a tufting machine to create amazingly realistic images. Other alternatives, such as photography or texture-mapping over color fields, are not accurate enough to be useful,” claims Caleb Ludwick, market intelligence manager at Tricycle. Tricycle's paper samples require zero oil, and only about 5% as much energyand water as real samples, and are more likely to be recycled after they’ve been used. ::