How long can a carpet look good? Carpet’s ability to retain its “like new” appearance is called appearance retention and improving appearance retention can have a dramatic impact on lifecycle cost, environmental issues and efficiency. New research has demonstrated an appearance retention improvement of 17% to 50% for commercial carpet installed with commercial bonded polyurethane cushion as compared to the same carpet directly glued to the floor. With the lowest grade of carpet tested, the carpet over cushion retained better appearance even with 1.5 times more traffic than the non-cushioned carpet.