Sustainable Growth - Interface, Inc.

Nylon Is Forever

the nylon molecule from which interface spins its carpet has two amazing properties: It is completely recyclable, and it is stable for eternity - which is why discarding it by the ton hardly makes sense. Still, there is a small flaw in Ray Anderson's plan to recycle carpet by leasing it and taking it back: Right now, it's neither feasible nor economical to turn carpet back into carpet.

Don Ellison, 50, a preacher-turned-factory manager, is explaining the problem at Interface's plant in West Point, Georgia. "Look at this beam of yarn," he says, pointing to a stainless-steel spool of yarn the size of a truck axle. The shining spool is meticulously wound with half a ton of yarn. "That beam has 205 'ends' of thread," says Ellison. "Five colors form a color pattern of 18 threads, repeated over and over." The 205 ends will be threaded into a large stitching machine and "tufted" into a lovely piece of tan carpeting flecked with turquoise and maroon. "Once you weave all this into carpet, stitched through and backed with latex, you can see the problem," says Ellison. "It's no easy task to take it apart, separate it, and use all those parts again."

True. But if recycling is hard, consider what it takes to make carpet. Helicopter out to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Straight down, beneath 750 feet of water and 11,000 feet of bedrock, is an enormous lake of crude oil. Suck up some of that crude, wind it onto Ellison's stainless-steel bobbin, and weave carpet out of it. That's no easy task either. Indeed, seen from that vantage point, making carpet the modern way - using oil rigs, tankers, petroleum-cracking plants, pipelines, and nylon-spinning factories - seems improbable.

That's the shift in perspective that Anderson wants to cultivate. At Interface, the change is happening in two ways. First, across the company, employees are wringing out as much waste as possible. At its plant in LaGrange, Georgia, Interface used to send six tons of carpet trimmings to the landfill every day: ribbons of brand new carpet, made and discarded within hours. By reducing the unnecessarily generous comfort margins built into its production system, the factory has dramatically reduced its scrap. Since June of last year, the plant has sent no trimmings to the landfill. What scrap remains is recycled - much of it back into carpet. Net savings: 3 million pounds a year of indestructible carpet that is not sent to the dump.

At Guilford of Maine, a division of Interface, new computer controls on the boilers in a fabric factory reduced carbon monoxide emissions by 99.7%, from two tons a week to a couple of hundred pounds a year. The computer controls also improved the efficiency of the boilers by 23%, by minimizing human error and by monitoring temperatures more precisely.

Every Interface factory has similar stories. At Bentley Mills - a division in Los Angeles that makes luxurious, high-end carpet - the amount of scrap carpet wasn't even tracked until June 1996. When employees first measured the scrap, they discovered they were throwing away 2 running yards of carpet for every 100 yards they stitched. That's the equivalent of operating the factory two days a year, three shifts a day, and throwing all that carpet away. By the end of 1997, the scrap carpet had been cut by 30%.

The second change sweeping Interface is the company's determination to transform the way carpet is made and sold in the 21st century. At the moment, the Bentley Mills dye house, where carpet yarn gets its vivid colors, is still the kind of factory that Charles Dickens would recognize: cavernous, smelling of ammonia, with cauldrons radiating clouds of steam. Huge carts, stacked with carefully skeined yarn, are lined up everywhere. Some yarn is the whitish gray of raw thread; the rest presents a riot of color - mauve, aqua, tan, blue. The process of giving thread its color hasn't changed in 5,000 years. Put the thread in a pot that contains water and a dyeing agent. Boil it. Dry it.

At the Bentley Mills dye house, the cauldrons can handle 5,000 pounds of yarn at once; 10,000 gallons of water and dye are brought to a boil in a vat big enough to submerge a compact car. The yarn is dried in an oven the size of a small trailer house. It's a system that consumes an enormous amount of energy - and that could never be run on solar panels.

Around the corner in the dye house, workers are using a different method to color yarn. The raw yarn unspools through a couple of glass-enclosed boxes, through a small steam box, and then into a series of drying chambers. Then, fully colored, it spools back onto a cone at the end of the line. In that first set of boxes, dye is sprayed onto the moving strand of yarn. Excess dye is captured and constantly recycled. The steam chamber fixes the dye.

Each drying box is not much larger than a microwave oven. A strand of yarn speeds through it at 1,200 feet per minute.