This article appeared in the Sept./Oct 2003 issue of Spirituality & Health.

One day Ray Anderson realized with a jolt that he was part of the problem.

It was August 1994, and the CEO and founder of Interface, Inc., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, understood how much environmental degradation his company caused simply by following perfectly legal, commonly accepted methods of operation.

“We do take a lot of petrol-derived materials from non-renewable sources -- natural gas, oil, coal -- and we use a lot of energy that today comes from those same fossil fuels that generate greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming,” he says. And back then, “we weren’t too terribly mindful of what was coming out of our smokestacks, either. Or what was coming into our factories.”

Anderson came to his shattering understanding while reading The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken. It had landed on his desk as he was struggling to write a speech for Interface’s newly formed environmental task force. He didn’t know what to say. He had never considered corporate environmental issues beyond complying with the law. Yet the book became “a spear in my chest that remains to this day,” he explains. “I was reading passages in bed at night to my wife, and we would weep together.”


Becoming a Restorative Enterprise
Anderson used his epiphany to begin transforming the company he created in 1973. He assigned the task force a Herculean mission: Convert Interface to a restorative enterprise, first by reaching sustainability in its practices and then by becoming truly restorative -- a company that returns more to the earth than it takes. In addition to retaining its high ranking as a supplier of commercial carpeting, he later vowed, Interface will be “the first name in industrial ecology worldwide through actions, not words” by 2020.

How does Interface, headquartered in Atlanta, plan to achieve this lofty goal? By harvesting used carpets, recycling old petrochemicals into new materials, and converting sunlight into energy -- much of which will require developing new technology, not to mention educating customers, suppliers, and partners. “There will be zero scrap going into landfills and zero emissions into the biosphere,” Anderson

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