Ray Anderson on green building, Republicans and, of course, sustainability

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Ray Anderson’s conversion from polluting industrialist to environmental crusader is by now legendary.

The founder and now chairman of Interface Inc. read Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Commerce, and concluded his company was part of the problem. So he did something that hadn’t been done before: Anderson grafted a radical commitment to environmental stewardship onto the core values of an existing, large, publicly held, American manufacturing company.

The world’s leading carpet-tile maker has spent the last 17 years climbing what Anderson calls “Mount Sustainability” and is still aiming to achieve “Mission Zero” — no environmental footprint — by 2020. At the same time, the company is financially healthy as ever (much better off than it would have been otherwise, according to Anderson), rewarding shareholders with a stock price nine times what it was 2008.

While Anderson has basked during that time in the praise of the corporate responsibility movement, he’s taken on a role as eco-evangelist with the relish of the gifted pitchman he is. The company boasts that he’s talked to more than 100 audiences a year about sustainable business practices. He’s hosted high-level executives from Walmart, GE and other companies who made the pilgrimage to his LaGrange, Ga., factory to learn more about Interface’s transformation. Earlier this week, Boyd Cohen, co-author of a new book on “climate capitalism,” listed Anderson as one of the world’s top 10 practitioners of that art.

Anderson’s own book, Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist, is being re-issued this month as a paperback, with an updated foreword in which he briefly but candidly discusses the personal challenge he’s facing for the last couple of years.

“Cancer is no fun,” he writes. “If you don’t receive the right treatment, you die; and even with the very best treatment you can still die. I seem to be receiving the right treatment; though the very best results one can hope for, complete remission (which I am nowhere near yet), leave one knowing it can recur, maybe in a different part of the body as a metastasis, or maybe in a mutated form.”

Anderson declined to discuss his illness during our interview, citing the fact that Interface, as a public company, is governed by SEC regulations regarding the disclosure of material information about its officers. He did, however, wax eloquent about a number of other topics, ranging from familiar anecdotes about Interface’s climb up Mount Sustainability to insights about business practices and green construction. And while he offered a glum assessment of today’s political environment, he finds reason to be optimistic about a new generation of better educated professionals.

Anderson started by disabusing me of a misimpression I’d gotten 17 years ago as an environmental reporter in Georgia.

Do you recall a neighborhood environmental protest back in the early ’90s against the proposed citing of an Interface plant in a LaGrange office park? I covered that controversy and have been under the impression for years that it led toward your epiphany on the environment.

I actually don’t recall that controversy, but let me tell you how it all got started. In 1994, we began to hear questions from our customers that we hadn’t heard before, and we didn’t have any answers. ‘What is your company’s environment vision?’ It was an embarrassment to our salespersons.

So I put together a task force to come up with an answer to that question, and the task force had to wrap up its work by that August — August 1994. But before they could finish they told me, “You’ve got to give us your environmental vision.” Hell, I didn’t have an environmental vision.

And just then Paul Hawken’s book lands on my desk, where I am sweating what to say. It was sent to me by one of our sales people in California. … On page 19 or so, I came to a chapter heading: “The Death of Earth.” Within 20 pages, it was like a spear in my heart.

Hawken has a three-part argument, and it starts off with [the idea that] we’re operating a waste-making machine and calling it industry. … And he points out that only business and industry has the resources and the tools to solve the problem. So, there I was: part of the problem and theoretically part of the solution.

You’ve dedicated the years since to something bigger than just running a company. Have you had the impact you hoped to have?

That is something I have no way of knowing. Companies don’t share credit. If they do it, it has to be their idea.

I’ll tell you this: Walmart sent two teams to our factory in LaGrange: Mike Duke [now the CEO] headed one of teams; the other was led by the fellow who’s now the No. 2 over there. So the top two men at Walmart have been to our factory. And they were convinced that their suppliers could do the same thing. In other words, we supplied a model that could they could go back to their suppliers with and say, “You need to do this.”

Much more narrowly, I’ve noticed that other carpet companies now are engaged in their own sustainability efforts.

Probably everybody now has their environmental program. You know, this is a very oil-intensive industry, so it’s [not easy].

With this very first challenge to our company, I also challenged [Interface employees] to be a restorative company — not just through what we do, but through influencing what others do as well. We probably have a way to go with that.

Did you think from the start that your sustainability campaign would be such a defining, all-encompassing effort?

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