Ga. carpet maker a leader in climate change awareness

Ray Anderson built his $1 billion Georgia-based carpet business by, as he describes it, plundering the earth: using lots of fossil fuels and water, and creating mountains of carpet scraps in landfills.

Now he’s got Interface Inc.’s 4,000 employees climbing Mount Sustainability and working on Misson Zero, a multi-faceted goal to make the company environmentally neutral by 2020. Time International magazine recently named Anderson one of its “Heroes of the Environment.”

He and former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart also are co-chairing a committee that advises the University of Coloroda-Denver-based Presidential Climate Action Project, an organization of academic, political and business leaders coming up with 300 ways the next president can combat global warming.

Chief among them is a recommendation to shift federal subsidies from fossil-fuel-using industries to small businesses that are developing renewable forms of energy and other environmentally friendly technologies.

Robert Reiss, radio host of the CEO Show, recently called Anderson the global corporate leader in pushing businesses to become more environmentally responsible. Interface last year started a consulting business to market its practices to other companies.

The company says 20 percent of the materials it uses to produce carpets is either from recycled goods or is from renewable resources, and Anderson says he’d like to push that to 100 percent. The company is also trying to reduce pollution and waste in other ways, using solar power at a factory in southern California, for example.

Anderson began taking his company in a new direction, a mid-course correction as he calls it, in 1994, when he was 60 years old.

He was already an innovator. He’d started Interface in 1973 after seeing carpet tiles in England. He brought the concept to this country, where he revolutionized floor coverings for offices, airports and schools.

Interface tiles are about 20 inches by 20 inches. They can be mailed to customers in a box for do-it-yourself installation. If there’s a spill or the tiles are stained for other reasons, it’s an easier fix than replacing an entire carpet. Just pull up the tile and wash it off in the sink. If that doesn’t work, replace the piece.

“I fell in love with the idea. It just made so much sense,” said Anderson, now 73.

For the last five years, Interface has been slicing into the $11 billion U.S. residential carpet market. The hip product is popular among condo dwellers, and receives high marks from environmentalists because it can be recycled. And Flor recently teamed up with the Martha Stewart brand to reach an even wider audience.

The company’s first showroom opened in 2004 in Midtown Atlanta at Spring and 5th Streets near Georgia Tech, Anderson’s alma mater. The West Point, Ga., native arrived at Tech in 1952 with a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in industrial engineering. He got his start in textiles at Callaway Mills in West Georgia.

Anderson recently spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the transformation taking place at the company’s LaGrange factory, where most of the Flor carpet tiles are made for the residential market.

A long wall in the building’s administrative offices tells the story through photos and milestones since Anderson’s “epiphany” in 1994 when he read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken.

Q: How did the book change you?

A: It was like a spear in the chest — thunk. I had never given a single thought to what we were taking from the Earth. . . I was convicted as a plunderer of the Earth, and I’ve spent the last 13 years as a recovering plunderer.

Q: How motivated are you by concerns over global warming?

A: Climate change is a real problem. … If we do business as usual. . . by the year 2030 we will hit the [amount of greenhouse gas emissions] that scientists say is the threshold of catastrophic climate change. . . which means we have to get going now.

Q: Have any of the presidential candidates responded to your group’s climate action report published earlier this month?

A: They’re all playing it close to the vest. We don’t know who’s going to pick it up yet. … We want [climate change] to be an issue. We want voters to ask who will be the most effective about fixing this thing?

Q: Have you spoken to Georgia’s political leaders about what the state can do?

A: No. You don’t waste your time.

Q: Other carpet makers are also touting themselves as green companies and using recycled materials. What sets Interface apart?

A: We didn’t stop [with recycling materials]. We’re on to restoration. Let’s put back more than we take. Let’s do more good than harm. …. I’m quite sure we’ve moved the entire industry.

Q: Can you make a business case for your environmentalism?

A: Our cost is down, not up. [The company has saved more than $350 million since 1994 largely by reducing carpet scrap waste]. Our products are the best they’ve ever been. … Our people are just galvanized around the shared higher purpose. It’s attractive to the best people. And the good will of the marketplace has enhanced the company’s profile. We couldn’t have bought it with all the advertising dollars in the world.

Q: What does sustainability mean?

A: At Interface, it means operating our petroleum-intensive company in such a way as to take nothing from the earth that’s not naturally and rapidly renewable and do no harm to the biosphere. On the equity side, it means treating people fairly.

http://www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2007/12/28/anderson_1230.htmlBy STACY SHELTON