Gunther Pauli Cleans Up

Ecover is a small company with a big idea: to reinvent the cleaning business around the world. Gunter Pauli is a young CEO with a new model of enterprise: the company as open economic system and closed ecological system.

From its headquarters in Malle, Belgium, a village outside Antwerp, Ecover is challenging Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, and the other global packaged-goods giants. At one level, it sounds profoundly mundane: Doing the laundry. Washing the dishes. Cleaning the windows. At another level, it is mundanely profound: a $20 billion industry in North America alone, 7 billion pounds of laundry detergent last year, and one of the world's most overlooked sources of environmental destruction. Cleaning, it turns out, can be a dirty business.

Enter Ecover. The company sells everything from laundry powder and dishwashing liquid to shampoos and car wax. Its products use only natural soaps and renewable raw materials: vegetable extracts, sugar derivatives, natural oils. To make them, Pauli has built the world's most ecological factory.

The place is a green marvel. A huge grass roof keeps the factory cool in summer and warm in winter. The water-treatment system runs on wind and solar energy. The bricks in the walls are made of recycled clay from coal mines.

Ecover's relentless pursuit of green manufacturing has created a sensation in Europe. When the factory opened in October 1992, big-name politicians, environmentalists, newspaper reporters, and TV cameras all showed up. Since then it has become sort of a biodegradable tourist attraction, drawing activists from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth as well as engineers from Dow Chemical and Chrysler.

Ecover generates annual sales of $30 million. But its public impact far exceeds its size, and its size is increasing at geometric rates. Ecover is in a position to shape the debate around the future of one of the world's most ubiquitous industries - and shaping the debate is Ecover's lever for growth.

This is serious business. And no one is more serious than CEO Gunter Pauli. At 37, Pauli is a role model for the energetic global manager. He speaks six languages. He travels constantly. He is never without a cellular phone. He swears by his fax-modem. "No one at Ecover gets a company car," says Pauli. "Everyone gets a PowerBook."

Fast Company met up with Pauli in New York City as he was ending a swing through North America. He had spent nearly a week in the Pacific Northwest looking for a site to build Ecover's second ecological factory. He had spent a day in Toronto talking business and politics with executives from one of the country's largest banks. He was about to leave for meetings at the White House and the EPA. It was, in other words, a typical week in his battle to clean up the cleaning establishment.

FAST COMPANY: I look at the world you compete in, and I don't see much room to maneuver. A handful of global companies, each with billions of dollars of sales, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and promotion to dominate the supermarket. What do you see?

GUNTER PAULI: I see huge opportunities. The giant companies are on the wrong side of history. Their products use hundreds of highly toxic chemicals. They know it, they are not happy about it, and they are struggling to change it. Their manufacturing systems consume vast amounts of energy. They know it, they want to do something about it, but there sit the factories. They are under constant scrutiny from the environmentalists and constant pressure from the financial markets.

Think about the logic of this industry: what's in the products, how they're made, how they're sold, what happens after they get used. Then ask yourself what any rational society would expect from products that perform the simple act of cleaning clothes or dishes or floors. The gap is enormous. That's our opportunity. A box of Tide is six thousand times more toxic than a box of Ecover. Six thousand times!

So you win by becoming the "green" alternative to the corporate establishment?

I don't like the term "green." If you say green product to most people - even to deep ecologists, the true believers - they assume you mean lousy performance at a high price. That's not Ecover. We develop high-technology products based on our mastery of soft chemistry - the chemistry of renewable resources. Our R&D people know more than anyone about how to apply the power of nature to the task of cleaning. We have biologists, biochemists, toxicologists. We can make 700 different varieties of soap. We understand the cleaning properties of a vast range of renewable materials: sugar, vinegar, starch from potatoes and corn, pine oil, coconut oil, pits from citrus fruits.

Sure we talk a lot about the environment. But Ecover is not in the green business. We are in the business of pioneering sustainable economic and social development.