Corporate sustainability pioneer and conservative southern gentleman Ray Anderson died earlier this month. Such a loss.
“There was no one remotely like him, nor will there ever be,” said author Paul Hawken in his eulogy.
Hawken’s profound respect was shared by business leaders around the world who took inspiration from Anderson’s transformation of Atlanta-based Interface, Inc., the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, into a company that took full responsibility for its impact on the world. One of his many awards was a Globe Environmental Excellence Award for Corporate Competitiveness presented at Globe 2006 in Vancouver. It was after reading Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce that Anderson experienced what he described as a “spear in the chest” epiphany. He suddenly saw himself, by his own reckoning, as “a plunderer of the earth,” and he became determined to change that.
“Theft is a crime,” Anderson told a TED conference in 2009. “And the theft of our children’s future will someday be considered a crime.”
With the same industrial and systems engineering savvy that he used to found Interface in 1973 as a producer of the first free-lay carpet tiles in America, he set the company on a course to climb what he called Mount Sustainability.
“If the CEO doesn’t take the lead, it won’t happen.
“In 1994, at age 60 and in my company’s 22nd year, I steered Interface on a new course – one designed to reduce our environmental footprint while increasing our profits,” Anderson said. “I wanted Interface, a company so oil-intensive you could think of it as an extension of the petrochemical industry, to be the first enterprise in history to become truly sustainable – to shut down the smokestacks, close off its effluent pipes, to do no harm to the environment and take nothing not easily renewed by the earth. Believe me when I say the goal is one enormous challenge.”
Today Interface is on track to become a completely closed-loop business system, taking no more from the earth than it returns. Anderson says the savings from waste reduction alone have paid for the extensive costs of the company makeover. It has done that while growing financially to a profitable billion-dollar multi-national corporation, and being named by Fortune as one of the “Most Admired Companies in America” and the “100 Best Companies to Work For.”
“People called Ray a dreamer,” said Hawken. “To be sure, he was, but he was also an engineer. He had definitely seen the mountain, but he also dreamed in balance sheets, thermodynamics and resource-flow theory. He dreamed a world yet to come.”
To cite just one example, Anderson sent his designers into the forest to learn from nature in the spirit of “biomimicry.” They came up with a design for interchangeable carpet tiles that mimicked the chaotic mix of diversity on the forest floor, where, as Anderson tells it, “you can pick up a rock here and drop it there and you can’t tell you’ve changed a thing.”
Called Entropy, that product line became the company’s best-selling product.
“Sustainability is now the brand for Interface,” Anderson said in a 2004 interview with www.greenbiz.com. “What’s in a brand? Well, for a company there’s hardly anything more important than its brand. And sustainability is now a brand that’s recognized in the marketplace and there is a pre-disposition on the part of lots and lots of designers that deal with us because of that.”
Customers were attracted because of the passion and deep sincerity to his cause that Anderson infused in all his employees. They wanted to be part of it.
Said Hawken: “He used business as a means to educate and transform, but his life was not about money or carpets. Ray’s life was about the sacred. His covenant was with God; the marketplace is where he laboured.”