Ray Anderson reflects on the 15 years passed in his effort to transform a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing operation, from a petro-intensive resource “plunderer” into a zero-footprint, eternally sustainable company.
It’s looking good – he’s 60 percent of the way up that mountain he talks about, and he and his people can now see the top. They know they’re going to get there.
I love how he talks about the culture change in his company, and how his products are actually vastly better now, because of the “lens of sustainable design” that the company now looks through.
Most importantly, as Anderson states, the business case for sustainability as a profitmaker has now emerged – and Anderson’s company, Interface, has prominently helped to blaze a trail into this emergence.
I was struck by something Anderson wrote in his book, Mid-Course Correction, published back in 1998, before today’s melting ice had really started to scare us.
Suppose, said Anderson,
that global warming, to cite just one threat, turns out to be so vividly demonstrable and undeniably true that the whole world wakes up one day with a gigantic cry of alarm. Suppose consumer outrage erupts and markets shift overnight. Where will the capacity to respond be found? A lack of capacity for response could be a stupendous stumbling block to Earth’s welfare.
This is a huge dynamic force for sustainability. All it takes is consumer perception to change, and suddenly all the old companies become outlaws, and only the new ones will do business. This was Anderson’s epiphany over 15 years ago.
Anderson’s goal of becoming the first completely sustainable industrial company has taken 15 years to get to the 60 percent mark. Interface is on target for closed-loop, zero-waste, zero-ecologically imbalanced manufacturing by 2020. It will then have almost a three-decade lead on any of its competition.
