Interface celebrates ten years of sustainability in action

Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, Inc experienced a "spear in the chest" epiphany when reading Paul Hawken's, 'The Ecology of Commerce'. Ten years and a sea change later, Interface, Inc., celebrates its gratifying progress on a journey towards a vision that no one would have imagined for the company, or the petroleum-intensive carpet manufacturing industry, which has been forever changed by Anderson's vision.

"The vision is not just to change our company and eliminate our environmental footprint, but, through the power of our influence on others, to become restorative," said Anderson. "In nine years, at the end of 2003, we had progressed about one-third of the way from where we started in 1994, toward our goal of zero footprint - what we call the top of Mount Sustainability. To name a few relevant metrics:

• Carbon intensity, down one-third.
• Greenhouse gases down 46% absolute.
• Number of smokestacks reduced by 33%, number of effluent pipes reduced by 47%, with water usage down 78% per yard of carpet tile and 40% per yard of broadloom.

This reduced footprint is embodied in every product we produce. As we perform life cycle assessments on our products, we are moving toward evaluating our manufacturing facilities on the basis of the cumulative impact of all the products a facility produces; and we are doing this worldwide."

Anderson looks to the future: "The remaining two-thirds of Mount Sustainability is twice as high as the one-third we have traversed. Looking ahead to the next 10 years at Interface, if we are successful in executing our plan:

• Waste will be halved again;
• Energy will be further reduced in relative terms by half again;
• Half the remaining energy will come from renewable sources (photovoltaics, wind, biomass);
• The number of smokestacks and effluent pipes remaining will be halved;
• Half of all materials will be post consumer recycled, including a portion from nylon 6,6, said by some to be commercially impossible;
• Interface as a whole will be climate neutral;
• The Evergreen Service Agreement will be a major factor and a big competitive advantage as we move toward selling the "service" our products deliver, while retaining ownership in the products themselves, along with responsibility for recycling them.
• "ReEntry" - our reverse logistics and closed loop recycling initiative - will become a way of life.

In an average of 80 speeches a year over the last 10 years, Ray has espoused a new worldview where the economy is recognised to be the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. Putting it another way, Ray asks: "What CEO, given a subsidiary that required a constant and continual infusion of capital (natural capital, in this case) just to keep it going, would keep that subsidiary very long? None that I know, and nature is a better manager than any CEO I know, and capable of being far more ruthless if she needs to be."

Interface, Inc. is a global leader in the manufacture of environmentally-responsible floorcoverings and other textiles, through business units including Interface Asia-Pacific, as well as Bentley Prince Street, Interface Fabrics, Interface Flooring Systems, InterfaceFLOR, and Interface Europe. The company is committed to giving the marketplace a wide range of choices for specifying Earth-friendly and certified environmentally preferable products. Interface also introduced the industry's first climate neutral carpet, Cool Carpet™, as well as the only carpet product to be designed using biomimicry, the i2™ collection from Interface Flooring Systems. The company introduced a residential carpet product (InterfaceFLOR) created from the bio-based, plant-derived fibre, Ingeo™. Interface Fabrics offers the Terratex® brand of commercial fabrics, the first to be made of 100% post consumer and post industrial polyester and wool; now also available with bio-based fibres.