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UPthEM – Upskilling Pathways for Employability
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right here in California, City of Industry, where water is so precious. Renewable or recyclable
materials are 25 % of the total, and growing rapidly. Renewable energy is 27 % of our total,
going for 100 %. We have diverted 148 million pounds -- that's 74,000 tons -- of used carpet
from landfills, closing the loop on material flows through reverse logistics and post-consumer
recycling technologies that did not exist when we started 14 years ago.

Those new cyclical technologies have contributed mightily to the fact that we have produced
and sold 85 million square yards of climate-neutral carpet since
2004, meaning no net contribution to global climate disruption in
producing the carpet throughout the supply chain, from mine and
well head clear to end-of-life reclamation -- independent third-party certified. We call it Cool
Carpet. And it has been a powerful marketplace differentiator, increasing sales and profits.
Three years ago we launched carpet tile for the home, under the brand Flor, misspelled F-L-O-
R. You can point and click today at https://www.flor.com/ and have Cool Carpet delivered to
your front door in five days. It is practical, and pretty too.

We reckon that we are a bit over halfway to our goal: zero impact, zero footprint. We've set
2020 as our target year for zero, for reaching the top, the summit of Mount Sustainability. We
call this Mission Zero. And this is perhaps the most important facet: we have found Mission
Zero to be incredibly good for business. A better business model, a better way to bigger profits.
Here is the business case for sustainability. From real life experience, costs are down, not up,
reflecting some 400 million dollars of avoided costs in pursuit of zero waste -- the first face of
Mount Sustainability. This has paid all the costs for the transformation of Interface.

And this dispels a myth too, this false choice between the environment and the economy. Our
products are the best they've ever been, inspired by design for sustainability, an unexpected
wellspring of innovation. Our people are galvanized around this shared higher purpose. You
cannot beat it for attracting the best people and bringing them together. And the goodwill of the
marketplace is astonishing. No amount of advertising, no clever marketing campaign, at any
price, could have produced or created this much goodwill. Costs, products, people,
marketplaces -- what else is there? It is a better business model.

And here is our 14-year record of sales and profits. There is a dip there, from 2001 to 2003: a
dip when our sales, over a three-year period, were down 17 percent. But the marketplace was
down 36 percent. We literally gained market share. We might not have survived that recession
but for the advantages of sustainability. If every business were pursuing Interface plans, would
that solve all our problems? I don't think so. I remain troubled by the revised Ehrlich equation,
I equals P times A divided by T2. That A is a capital A, suggesting that affluence is an end in
itself. But what if we reframed Ehrlich further? And what if we made A a lowercase 'a,'
suggesting that it is a means to an end, and that end is happiness -- more happiness with less
stuff.

You know that would reframe civilization itself and our whole system of economics, if not for
our species, then perhaps for the one that succeeds us: the sustainable species, living on a finite

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