Boutique Design | boutiquedesign.com

Interface’s founder championed green manufacturing.

By Matthew Hall

In the cover story of the July+August 2011 issue of Boutique Design, ForrestPerkins’ Cliff Tuttle recalls that his “aha!” moment in green design came in 2004, when he learned at a tradeshow that a major carpet manufacturer had produced enough carpet strike-offs (samples) in the previous year to fill three Empire State Buildings. In a similar vein, I recently ran across another green-related epiphany—albeit one that preceded Tuttle’s by a decade—involving Ray Anderson, the founder of carpet-tile manufacturer Interface Inc.

Anderson, 77, died Aug. 8, after a battle with cancer. In its obituary of the Atlanta-based businessman, The New York Times recounted how in 1994, the then-60-year-old Anderson read a book, “The Ecology of Commerce,” by Paul Hawken, “that described people like him as thieves and plunderers of the planet. He saw the author’s point. He even wept. Then he set out to change things.”

In the aftermath of that ecological awakening, the Times noted, “Anderson seemed to think about nothing else—crisscrossing the country with a near-evangelical fervor, telling fellow executives about the need to reduce waste and carbon emissions.” Those efforts drew praise from environmental organizations and earned him an appointment to a White House environmental commission under President Bill Clinton. “They also helped his company’s bottom line,” the Times story noted. “‘What started out as the right thing to do quickly became the smart thing,’ he told a business group in Toronto in 2005. ‘Cost savings from eliminating waste alone have been $262 million.’”

Just a week before his death, we received a news release from Interface about Anderson being awarded an honorary doctorate from Georgia Tech. (He graduated from that school in 1956 with a degree in industrial engineering.) Though he was too ill to attend the graduation ceremony in person, a representative from the company’s environmental foundation read these remarks on his behalf: “To be acknowledged with this award from my alma mater is a special honor. I hope that in accepting this we place another spotlight on our company’s efforts to eliminate negative impact on the environment. We refer to this as Mission Zero. And we hope it inspires the future business leaders in the audience of 900 graduates to carry this message with them into the companies they will work for tomorrow and well into the future.”

Here’s hoping the grads (and others) will take that message to heart and work to help put the “mission accomplished” label on eco-friendly initiatives like Interface’s Mission Zero.