Ray Anderson
Sustainable Business
Ray Anderson believes we are at the dawn of a new industrial revolution. He is 72 years old, with a soft Georgia accent and a kind, rather rumpled face - an unlikely-looking radical. Yet he may well be the most visionary figure in American business today. As chairman of the textile manufacturer Interface he has transformed the company he founded 33 years ago into the world's first industrial firm devoted to sustainability in the strictest sense: "taking nothing from the earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere." This would be a tough mission if you grew vegetables commercially. If you make carpeting, which for decades has been utterly dependent on petrochemicals, it is seemingly impossible. Yet it is happening. From a standing start in 1994, Interface is on track to be fully sustainable by 2020.
When Anderson asked questions about Interface's overall impact,he became alarmed. He asked his engineers to determine what had been extracted from the earth to produce the company's income. That year (1994) Interface had $800 million in revenue, and the engineers concluded that to get there they had used 1.2 billion pounds of raw materials, most of it oil and natural gas, and much of that incinerated. "I was staggered" says Anderson "I wanted to throw up. My company's technologies and those of every other company I know of anywhere, in their present forms, are plundering the earth. This cannot go on and on and on."
These days he spends much of his time on the road (150 speeches last year) spreading the gospel of sustainability. He says: "I prefer to describe myself as a husband, a father, and an industrialist in that order. Some people call me a 'radical' industrialist, but I want to assure you that I am as competitive and profit-minded as anyone in this room." He offers the story of his conversion and his new credo for industry. His message carries the peculiar gravity of someone whose life and company have been changed by his convictions. "I am a recovering plunderer," he says, "and an organization of more than 5,000 people, daily, is instrumental in that recovery."