PFAS has become an important topic of conversation—not only in Dalton, but across the country and around the world. As scientists continue to learn more about this large family of chemicals, research continues to advance, regulations continue to evolve, and industries are adapting to new expectations.
Like many communities, Dalton has been part of that broader conversation – prompting important discussions about environmental stewardship, public health, manufacturing, and the future of our community.
This article is not intended to answer those broader questions.
Instead, this article shares one conversation with Shaw Industries about a specific technical challenge the company says it encountered while working to remove PFAS from its manufacturing process. The perspectives and technical explanations that follow reflect Shaw Industries’ account of that work.
How do you verify that raw materials are PFAS-free when the available testing methods weren’t designed to detect PFAS in those materials?
The conversation that follows offers one company’s perspective on that challenge and the process it developed to address it. It is not intended to resolve the broader issues surrounding PFAS—including public health, litigation, regulation, or responsibility—but rather to provide insight into one technical aspect of a much larger and still-evolving conversation.
Why We’re Telling This Story
Believe Greater Dalton exists to strengthen our community by connecting people, ideas, and partnerships that help Greater Dalton thrive.
Some conversations are easy. Others are more complex. We believe strong communities are willing to engage with both.
Our role is not to determine outcomes or settle debates. Our role is to convene conversations, ask thoughtful questions, and create opportunities for our community to better understand the opportunities and challenges shaping Greater Dalton’s future.
This conversation with Shaw Industries represents one perspective on one technical aspect of PFAS. We share it in that spirit—with the hope that thoughtful dialogue, transparency, and a willingness to learn from one another strengthen our community.
Believe Greater Dalton believes informed communities are stronger communities. By fostering thoughtful conversations and sharing diverse perspectives, we hope to encourage greater understanding of the issues, opportunities, and people shaping the place we all call home.
Shaw Industries had been working for years to remove a family of chemicals from their manufacturing process, and they thought they’d succeeded.
They had stopped using the chemicals. They had required their suppliers to certify, in writing, that the raw materials they sent contained none of them. They had taken equipment apart, replaced pipes, and brought in industrial crews to scrub the residue off their machines.
And yet, the chemicals were still showing up in the wastewater.
For Kellie Ballew, that was the problem that would not let go.
Ballew is Shaw’s vice president of environmental affairs, and this is her thirty-first year at the company. After three decades, she still calls Shaw her work family, and she means it.
“I wouldn’t do something like this for thirty-one years if it weren’t such a special group of people,” she says.
The engineering culture is part of why she stayed. Shaw, she’ll tell you, is the kind of place that doesn’t stick its head in the sand when something doesn’t add up, which is exactly what made the chemical question so perplexing.
A Family Called PFAS
PFAS is shorthand for a sprawling family of chemicals, somewhere around 15,000 of them by the EPA’s count.
“PFAS is like saying apple,” she says. There are thousands of varieties: Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith. Some you eat right from the tree, some you bake with, some are green and some are red. They’re all still apples. When Ballew names one specific chemical, she’ll say which one, but when she says PFAS, she means the whole orchard.
Chemical companies started making PFAS in the 1940s because they were good at repelling water, oil, grease, and stains while standing up to heat. This versatility made them useful across a wide range of products, including soap and cosmetics, pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags, dental floss, contact lenses, and toilet paper. PFAS proved so useful that, decades later, they’re nearly everywhere.
Some PFAS have picked up a nickname, “forever chemicals,” because they don’t break down easily, and research has tied them to environmental and human health concerns. The more scientists learn about PFAS, the more regulations evolve to meet the science. In the coming year, updated Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards are phasing in from the federal level, and more than 1,000 water systems across the country will need to take action to meet them.
Uncovering the Mystery
Like many other manufacturing companies, carpet manufacturers used PFAS for decades to help floors resist stains and spills. Shaw moved away from them over a span of years, and by January 2019 had stopped using PFAS-based materials in all of its U.S. carpet manufacturing. The company put policies in place and had suppliers sign agreements promising PFAS-free materials.
Then came the surprises, each one stranger than the last.
First, trace amounts lingered in the equipment itself, years after the chemicals had last been used. Ballew compares it to cholesterol building up in an artery. You can’t always see it, but it’s there, and you can measure it before and after a piece of equipment is used. So Shaw took machinery apart, replaced pipes, and hired crews to clean the residue out of its facilities.
That discovery helped, but it wasn’t enough.
The next surprise was hiding in the supply chain. Materials would arrive from suppliers who swore, hand on heart, that they were clean. The lab would test them and report that no PFAS were detected. And yet, when Shaw ran those materials through its manufacturing process, PFAS would show up in the wastewater.
“Shaw is the first to ask me about this,” suppliers would tell Ballew. “You’re the first to tell me there’s something wrong with my material.”
The materials were contaminated, even though the persistent testing said they weren’t. Something didn’t add up.
The answer turned out to be in the testing itself. PFAS regulations were written around drinking water, so the labs and their methods were all built to test drinking water. The raw materials going into a carpet plant are nothing like drinking water. They include a variety of compounds, including soaps, oils, resins, and lubricants. When these materials were run through a test designed for a glass of water, the PFAS components simply didn’t register.
“When materials we purchased were tested using existing drinking water protocols, they would show non-detect for PFAS,” Ballew says. “What we discovered is that drinking water testing wasn’t accurate for soaps, oils, resins, and other solid materials.”
So the contamination was real, but the tests had not evolved to detect the compounds.
Four Years at the Bench
Shaw Industries formed a task force, led by Ballew. She hand-picked her team from across the company: someone from residential manufacturing, someone from fiber, and a chemist named Clay Hampton. The group spent four years on the problem, working together in the plants on nights and weekends, close enough that Ballew describes them less like coworkers and more like family.
Hampton, the chemist, eventually got frustrated because the outside labs they were trying to work with couldn’t provide solid testing. So, like a good chemist, he went to the chemistry bench. He pulled out his lab notebook and started iterating.
Then one day: Eureka.
It was seven or eight at night, and Ballew was in her car when the phone rang. It was Hampton, and he was crying. He had finally figured it out.
Hampton had created a way to replicate the same punishment raw materials go through inside a carpet mill: the heat, the time, the various chemical exposures. By submitting the materials to the same conditions as the manufacturing process, the new test was able to detect PFAS emerging from the depths of the materials.
“I’ll get emotional if I tell you about it,” Ballew says. Four years of carrying a responsibility this big, of not knowing whether the thing they were chasing even existed, and then the relief of learning that it did.
“It was a very big moment.”
For all the weight of that moment, the method itself was old-school bench chemistry.
“An adequate testing methodology didn’t exist,” she says, “so we invented one.”
Shaw’s methodology has since been independently reviewed by multiple subject matter experts and validated by the most accredited PFAS laboratory in the country. The results have been consistently replicated across hundreds of samples analyzed over the past two years, providing further confidence in its reliability and effectiveness.
Turning a Breakthrough into a Gift
When a company invents something like this, the usual next move is to lock it down through patenting or licensing it out for a fee. Shaw filed for a patent in December 2024, and then made a decision to share the patent-pending process with anyone who wanted answers to their own PFAS questions.
The logic is bigger than flooring. The raw material suppliers who sell to Shaw have other customers, too. Companies that make cosmetics, food packaging, and the paper products in your kitchen. If you can help one supplier find and remove PFAS, the fix reaches every other customer that supplier serves. Solve it in one place, and it spiderwebs out to dozens.
So Shaw has been traveling to other companies’ labs, helping them set up the PFAS testing process they invented.
“I hope that by sharing our testing innovation, others don’t have to start from scratch like we did,” Ballew says.
The testing breakthrough from Ballew’s team will ripple far from northwest Georgia. As more manufacturers and industries work to eliminate PFAS from their supply chains, the innovation that started in Dalton will spread across the country and, potentially, the world.
A History of Generosity in Dalton
Shaw Industries is coming up on 60 years in Dalton. Ballew has spent more than half of those years here, and she isn’t surprised by what her team pulled off. To her, this is what she’s come to expect from a group of hardworking, innovative scientists and engineers.
There’s a longer thread here, too, if you know the area’s history. More than a century ago, a teenager named Catherine Evans Whitener taught herself a tufting stitch and then, rather than keeping it to herself, taught it freely to every woman who asked. Thanks to her generosity and open-handedness, the flooring industry that built Greater Dalton was born.
A hundred-some years later, a team in the same town found an important problem and put their heads down for four years to find a solution. Then, rather than hoarding it for themselves, handed the answer to anyone who wanted it.
Some things about a place don’t change, they just find new forms. The generosity and ingenuity that started with Whitener have continued to evolve, now helping to solve an important challenge that spans industries and geographies.
Kellie Ballew is vice president of environmental affairs at Shaw Industries, headquartered in Dalton, Georgia. Shaw’s PFAS testing methodology was developed by company scientist and technical director Clay Hampton and is the subject of a patent-pending application filed in December 2024. To read more about the methodology, visit Shaw’s newsroom.
