Page 111 - UPthEM_Program_Final_December 2020

Case Study
Ray Anderson founded the company that makes
covetable Flor carpeting. But behind the fresh
design is a decades-deep commitment to
sustainable ways of doing business --
culminating in the Mission Zero plan. At his
carpet company, INTERFACE
(https://www.interface.com/US/en-US/homepage) Ray Anderson has increased sales and
doubled profits while turning the traditional "take / make / waste" industrial system on its head.
In a gentle, understated way, he shares a powerful vision for sustainable commerce. The
16
following talk was presented at an official TED conference, in February 2009 . Subtitles and
transcripts are available in 25 languages.

“Believe me or not, I come offering a solution to a very important part of this larger problem,
with the requisite focus on climate. And the solution I offer is to the biggest culprit in this
massive mistreatment of the earth by humankind, and the resulting decline of the biosphere.
That culprit is business and industry, which happens to be where I have spent the last 52 years
since my graduation from Georgia Tech in 1956. As an industrial engineer, cum aspiring and
then successful entrepreneur. After founding my company, Interface, from scratch in 1973, 36
years ago, to produce carpet tiles in America for the business and institution markets, and
shepherding it through start-up and survival to prosperity and global dominance in its field, I
read Paul Hawken's book, "The Ecology of Commerce," the summer of 1994. In his book, Paul
charges business and industry as, one, the major culprit in causing the decline of the biosphere,
and, two, the only institution that is large enough, and pervasive enough, and powerful enough,
to really lead humankind out of this mess. And by the way he convicted me as a plunderer of
the earth.

And I then challenged the people of Interface, my company, to lead our company and the entire
industrial world to sustainability, which we defined as eventually operating our petroleum-
intensive company in such a way as to take from the earth only what can be renewed by the
earth, naturally and rapidly -- not another fresh drop of oil -- and to do no harm to the biosphere.
Take nothing: do no harm. I simply said, "If Hawken is right and business and industry must
lead, who will lead business and industry? Unless somebody leads, nobody will." It's axiomatic.
Why not us? And thanks to the people of Interface, I have become a recovering plunderer.

I once told a Fortune Magazine writer that someday people like me would go to jail. And that
became the headline of a Fortune article. They went on to describe me as America's greenest
CEO. From plunderer to recovering plunderer, to America's greenest CEO in five years -- that,
frankly, was a pretty sad commentary on American CEOs in 1999. Asked later in the Canadian
documentary, "The Corporation," what I meant by the "go to jail" remark, I offered that theft is
a crime. And theft of our children's future would someday be a crime. But I realized, for that to
be true -- for theft of our children's future to be a crime -- there must be a clear, demonstrable

16 https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_anderson_the_business_logic_of_sustainability