Rolling out the green carpet

Interface boss Ray Anderson has shown that environmental sustainability need not come at the expense of profits, writes Mark Tran Thursday September 14, 2006Guardian Unlimited
Interface boss Ray Anderson
Just after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Ray Anderson was walking along a mountain trail in Nova Scotia, when he came across an enormous bull moose.
He thought of clapping his hands to shoo it away, but realised it would be a stupid thing to do. "I was the intruder and I backed off. The trail was the moose's territory and it would have been foolish for me to challenge it," Mr Anderson said.


The chairman of Interface, the world's biggest maker of commercial carpets, sees his encounter with the creature as a metaphor for Katrina. Just as the trail was the moose's territory, so the atmosphere was the earth's territory. Katrina was earth's devastating riposte to man's challenge in the form of global warming.
At 72, Mr Anderson no longer runs Interface on a daily basis. But as its founder, Mr Anderson helped turn the company into a champion of environmental sustainability long before some of the world's biggest corporate names - Wal-Mart, General Electric, Tesco and HSBC - saw the green light.
As well as being a pioneer on green issues in the business world, he showed that sustainability and profits were compatible. The fact that making carpets is a "dirty" business only bolsters his credibility.
Mr Anderson, one of the unlikely stars of the 2004 documentary The Corporation, a critique of big business, now gives about 100 speeches a year about his quasi-religious conversion from being a "plunderer" of natural resources to a "recovering plunderer". Mr Anderson yesterday visited Oriel College at Oxford University to preach his message of environmentally responsible capitalism.
Mr Anderson, with that soft drawl characteristic of the southern state of Georgia (think Jimmy Carter), spoke for an hour and a half to a group of US academics at a conference on global ethics. After listening in rapt attention, they gave him a standing ovation. Of course, Mr Anderson was preaching to the converted, but his message would have impressed a business crowd as well.
As he noted right from the start: "I was as competitive and profit-minded as anyone else. I was the head of the largest producer of industrial carpets."
Mr Anderson's moment of epiphany came 10 years ago when he read Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, described by one reviewer as a cultural and economic masterpiece. It was pure serendipity, as customers had begun asking awkward questions about what he was doing for the environment.
"It was an epiphanic spear in my heart, a life-changing moment; a new definition of success flooded my mind. I realised I was a plunderer and it was not a legacy I wanted to leave behind. I wept," he said.
This is the kind of stuff audiences love, but Mr Anderson would be laughed out of executive suites if his company had not been successful. Mr Anderson said he was fertile ground for Mr Hawken's message.
"I was 60. I was thinking of my legacy for the company I had founded, even questioning my future role. Should I just cut loose or help it find a new mission," Mr Anderson told Guardian Unlimited.
But Interface's share price is about $13, well off its $2 low of some years ago. Sales of its core business of carpet making, stripped of those loss-making units that have been sold in the last 10 years, have soared 58% in that period, while profit before tax has jumped 38%.
Asked why other companies had not adopted Interface's business model, given such an impressive record, Mr Anderson said the "good results had been obscured by the bad results in marginal businesses" that had since been sold.
At the time of his conversion, a competitor told Mr Anderson he was a dreamer. "Now they're trying to catch up," he added, with some satisfaction.
Interface looked to nature for designs that sought to please aesthetically, while also cutting down on waste material. Interface designers saw that pebbles on a beach or leaves in a forest lie in random fashion yet form a pleasing whole. So they mimicked nature by using random patterns. Carpet squares were placed next to each other whether or not a line in one joined up perfectly with a line on a neighbouring tile. Waste material fell dramatically without the need for fine tuning.
Engineers were encouraged to cut down on energy use. Some solutions were blindingly simple. An engineer saved money in a Shanghai factory by changing the width of the pipes needed to carry the liquids for making carpets. His bigger pipes created less friction, so less power was needed to pump the liquids. Thin pipes would have cost less, but the energy costs would have wiped out that initial benefit.
This year Interface unveiled Mission Zero, an initiative designed to see the global firm leave zero environmental footprint by 2020. Interface has already achieved a considerable amount in 12 years, reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 35%, most of that through energy efficiency measures and purchases of renewable energy. By the end of last year, Interface had cut its use of non-renewable energy to 27%, while boosting its use of renewable energy to 13%.
The company's green credentials have given Interface a huge marketing boost, as more companies seek to do businesses with a good environmental reputation. It is the kind of kudos that millions of advertising dollars could not achieve.
Mr Anderson describes sustainability as mountain with seven faces. First is elimination of waste, which also makes business sense as it has avoided costs of $300m. Second is to make emissions benign, which leads to the third face, renewable energy.
Fourth is to reuse old material: the company takes back old carpets and recycles them instead of sending them to the dump. Fifth was more efficient transport. Sixth is to change the attitude of suppliers and consumers and seventh is the redesign of commerce itself. They sound commonplace now because many firms have started adopting similar practices.
In this process, Mr Anderson sees Interface as a Sherpa, guiding other companies towards a more sustainable form of capitalism. That does leave the firm in a quandary. While it can take satisfaction at passing on the knowledge it has gained as a trailblazer, it could be sowing the seeds of its downfall.
As more and more companies proclaim themselves green, Interface will lose its unique selling point and it could lose the marketing edge it has enjoyed. For example, BSkyB, the UK satellite broadcaster, has said it wants to go "carbon neutral", just as Interface has done. Of course, Sky is not a carpetmaker, but there is nothing to stop Interface's rivals from copying its tactics, even if they will be playing catch-up. But that is fine for Mr Anderson who argues that business needs to completely change the way it does things to stop plundering the earth's resources.
"I see no other long term choice for industry to survive," he said. "Each of us has a role in this transformation. We must all learn to make peace with the earth, not to make war on it, or we will lose."