This article originally appeared in The Simplifier #25.

Sustainability—Good for Business, Good for the Environment

By Shawn Tuttle

The beginning of this article may be a bit tough to swallow. Really, I haven’t fallen into the doomsday pit! This article is about smart solutions for business. Know that your decisions do make a difference. If positive change can happen in the carpet industry (as you’ll see below), positive change can happen in whatever industry you are in. So on to…

The bad news
Air pollution-induced asthma.
Diminishing oil reserves.
Territorial disputes over diminishing oil reserves.
Global warming.
Eco-system devastation.
Over-flowing, and leaking landfills…These paint an ugly picture, but they cannot be ignored. They are an integral part of life in the 21st Century.

How did we get here?
The simple answer is that we need things to support our lifestyle. We need electricity, food, clothing, furniture, cars, Windex, coffee cups, shampoo, computers, and on and on.

Companies large and small have come to the rescue: “We’ll satisfy your wants, needs, and desires!” They take raw materials and transform them into useful products. Unfortunately, the practices used to extract raw materials from the earth and process them into sellable products has not been friendly to the environment.

We have a market economy. We keep buying, the companies keep producing.

Is that it? End of story? As long as we continue to eat, clothe ourselves, work, and play we have to accept and allow companies to degrade our environment?

Corporations have long existed with rights of personhood without the responsibility. Can we have Corporations with rights of personhood with responsibility?

YES! It’s called sustainable development, or sustainability, and it’s not a new concept.

What does sustainability mean?
The World Commission on Environment and Development has defined sustainability as that which “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

A little more poetically, I’ll summarize the concept as making decisions that effect the world today in such a way as our great-great-great grandchildren will say, “Thank you!” (and mean it!)

Is this do-good concept viable in today’s competitive global market? The people behind the Dow Jones index thinks so. Did you know that Dow Jones Sustainability indexes were launched in 1999?

The good news.
Wouldn’t it be great if global corporations had the mission of “taking nothing from the earth that is not rapidly and naturally renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere”?

Would you believe that this mission statement comes from Ray Anderson, chairman and founder of a company called Interface, a global leader in the carpet and textile manufacturing industry? Well, believe it!

The Story of Interface
For some 33 years, Interface has made carpet tiles, mostly for commercial applications. The carpet industry has been notoriously bad for the environment and a cause of health problems for installers, and people with chemical sensitivities. (In case you didn’t know, most carpets are made from the same stuff as oil, i.e. petro-chemicals.)

Interface’s client base was represented, in large part, by architects and interior designers, a group typically ahead of the curve in environmental awareness. They wanted to know what Interface was doing for the environment. (In other words, they were applying market pressure.) Anderson, whose policy had been to simply comply with the law and who hadn’t had much concern for the environment, was nonetheless a good businessman, and decided to look into his clients’ request.

The year was 1994 and the company was making about $800 million in revenue. He asked his engineers to determine what had been extracted from the earth to produce that. The answer shocked Anderson: 1.2 billion pounds of raw materials, mostly oil and natural gas. And to top it off, much of that had been incinerated.

He recognized that his company’s practices, and those of all the other companies he knew for that matter, were plundering the earth. (He now calls himself a “recovering plunderer.”)

While he had recently stepped down as CEO, he still had enough clout to change the course of the company he had founded 21 years before. That course was a quest for sustainability.

The company’s first move was to concentrate on reducing waste. The result? $60 million savings in the first 3 years, $300 million to date. These savings have financed the R&D department.

Now, their carpets are made with corn-based polymer and the office panel and upholstery fabrics are made from 100% recycled and/or 100% compostable materials. They are studying the gecko to figure out how to make the carpet stick without glue. They’ve established a program of leasing carpet to their customers. They keep it clean, replace tiles as necessary, and the best part, at the end of the carpets’ life cycle, they reclaim and recycle everything.

Imagine! A company taking responsibility for the lifetime of their product.

This industry leader promotes their MISSION ZERO statement, which is “our promise to eliminate any negative impact our company may have on the environment by the year 2020.”

That’s a tall order from an established company formerly dependent on fossil fuels. To heck with tradition!

Ray Anderson says we are in the dawn of the New Industrial Revolution.

I say we are in the era of Win-Win solutions!!

“The Story of Interface” section above was inspired and fueled by Richard Todd’s article, “The Industrialist“, printed in the November 2006 issue of Inc. magazine.

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Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify