Sustainable Growth - Interface, Inc.

Ray Anderson has spent most of his life as an environmental vandal. He has devoted his career - the better part of four decades - to mastering the black magic of the 20th century: He takes huge lakes of petroleum and spins them into elegant brocades.

The petroleum, which took millions of years to make, is irreplaceable. The brocades - beautiful woven fabrics that carpet offices and corridors from the U.S. Capitol to MTV headquarters - will last forever. After just 10 years, most of that fabric will end up in the dump.

Indeed, Anderson's success has been marked by a kind of galloping enviro-gluttony. He is the 63-year-old founder and CEO of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based company with 7,300 employees. Its business: turning petrochemicals into textiles. In 26 factories on four continents, Anderson's looms produce a million pounds of synthetic carpet and fabric every day - along with more than seven tons of air pollutants every year.

Ray Anderson is a certified captain of industrial capitalism. He is also becoming one of the nation's leading environmentalists, a radical who makes the folks from Greenpeace look timid.

Four years ago, Anderson made a decision that changed the course of his carpet company, and that could transform the nation's economy. He decided that Interface would become, as he put it, "the first fully sustainable industrial enterprise, anywhere." Anderson decided that his petrochemical conglomerate would become 100% environmentally benign.

His vision for the 21st century: Interface would no longer use virgin nylon yarn to stitch its fabrics. Interface's factories and offices would use power from renewable sources only. Interface would produce zero waste; indeed, it would reclaim its own products and use them as raw material for new textiles. And Interface would pull its suppliers and customers into its sustainability orbit, insisting that the products it bought be recyclable and nontoxic, pushing clients to think differently about carpeting - and about their own businesses. "I want to pioneer the company of the next industrial revolution," says Ray Anderson.

Anderson wants to turn the entire U.S. economy inside out. He wants to harness the awesome, triumphant engine of democratic capitalism to the task of fixing the environment - before that engine suffocates on its own waste. The concept is simple: For its first century, industrial capitalism has been obliviously, relentlessly linear: raw materials, energy, product, packaging, marketing, waste. In the century to come, Anderson wants business to evolve to the next level: cyclic capitalism. Companies would consume their own waste. Landfilllls, after a, are best seen as a yardstick of the failure of human ingenuity. In nature, there is no garbage; everyone's waste becomes someone else's food.

Anderson's thinking is so advanced, and the efforts at Interface are so far along, that Interface ranks as the most highly evolved big company in the country today. In terms of combining social responsibility and economic growth, no one comes close. At Interface, social responsibility and growth have become the same thing.

From 1995 to 1996, sales at the publicly traded company grew from $800 million to $1 billion. During that same period, the amount of raw materials used by the company dropped almost 20% per dollar of sales. Which means, says Anderson, "The world just saw the first $200 million of sustainable business."

Interface's performance shatters the idea that environmental stewardship is just another cost. During the first three years of the company's drive toward sustainability, from 1994 to 1997, its net income totaled about $84 million. During that time, the company saved $50 million - in reduced materials costs, reduced energy costs, and reduced waste. That money went to the bottom line, not to the dump.

Of course, you can't reinvent the modern industrial enterprise in just a year or two; it's not that easy to disconnect a giant company from a century's worth of supply arrangements and infrastructural habits. Interface still consumes 10,000 pounds of virgin nylon per hour, still trucks almost 30 tons of garbage to landfills per day, still sends 2.3 million pounds of CO2 into the air per week.

But a dramatic change has taken hold at the company. From the factory floor to the R&D lab, sustainability has become as important a consideration in every business decision as profitability. Interface, for instance, has developed a new idea about carpeting and customers: It wants to lease carpet instead of selling it. The company would make, install, and maintain the carpet, take it back from customers, and then turn the old carpet into new carpet.

Says John Picard, a corporate environmental consultant who helped Interface develop the leasing idea: "Ray Anderson is going to be one of those people you look back on and say, 'He changed the world.' Interface is the corporation of the 21st century."