You may never have met him, but it is entirely logical that you have seen or purchased his products.
Ray Anderson was known as a ”carpet-tile” mogul and founder of a company called Interface.
Interface took the world by storm, manufacturing carpet tiles and becoming the largest modular carpeting manufacturer in the world.
But in 1994 he became racked with guilt. Realising that his Georgia-based company was contributing to the destruction of the planet, he determined to change the company’s reliance on fossil fuel.
Anderson focused on all areas of the company; from the tiles made from petroleum-based nylon; the power that ran his plant came from petroleum-based fuels; the transport to and from his plants were on petroleum-fueled trucks. He became acutely aware that the entire process was very oil-dependent. He was quoted as saying:
“you could think of it as an extension of the petrochemical industry.” That realization, he said, “was an epiphanic spear in my heart, a life-changing moment. I realized I was a plunderer and it was not a legacy I wanted to leave behind.”
So he set out to change his company with what he called “a climb up Mount Sustainability.”
He radically reduced the company’s greenhouse gas emissions by 44%, fossil fuel consumption was supplemented by renewable energy from wind and solar, providing 30% of their power, resulting in the company becoming a leader in recycling carpet fibers, also reducing water usage down by 80% and landfill output by more than 100,000 tons.
His new vision had some positive side effects for the company too. His effort helped the company double its earnings, substantially increasing profits by being environmentally friendly.
“When it came to bending industrial processes to making peace with the planet, Ray Anderson was the greatest of them,” Ralph Nader said in a statement last week.
He wrote about his vision in two books, Mid-Course Correction (1998) and Confessions Of a Radical Industrialist (2009). Anderson, who estimated that the company was only half-way along in realizing his “Mission Zero” vision, died at his Atlanta home from cancer on August 8, three days after receiving an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Georgia Tech. He was 77.
From This is True for 14 August 2011
