Business Achieves Greatest Efficiencies When at Its Greenest

Thomas Petzinger Jr. / Wall Street Journal 7nov97

IT'S AMAZING how crisis opens the mind. A few years ago Ray Anderson's company, Interface Inc., was toppled from its No. I ranking in the world market for commercial carpeting. Costs were high and the stock price was low. Then, after bringing in a hard-charging turnaround expert, Mr. Anderson began to feel like an outsider in the very company he had created. As Internal tensions mounted, a corporate therapist was called to the scene.

In the midst of his soul searching, Mr. Anderson came across a 1993 book called "The Ecology of Commerce." He was stunned to read about the breadth of toxins accumulating in humans from one generation to the next and the speed at which natural resources were being depleted. Mr. Anderson could see his own company on every page: carpet mills sucking up hydrocarbons and spewing out toxins.

He wept, thinking about his grandchildren's future. "It was a spear in my chest," he says.

That arresting moment launched Mr. Anderson on a journey that not only lifted him from his funk but set his company in pursuit of a new mission: to one day create zero pollution and to consume zero oil while simultaneously advancing the interests of investors, employees and customers. His business model is the oldest of all: nature itself.

The conservative 62-year-old Mr. Anderson is an unlikely candidate for environmental pathbreaker. He spent years running textile plants in the South until he traveled to Europe in the early 1970s and saw computer rooms furnished in square "tiles" of carpeting. He established Interface to introduce "modular carpeting" to America, helping create the "office of the future."

BUT 20 YEARS later, Interface was adrift. On top of the company's other problems, customers began questioning its commitment to ecology, Just then, an Interface employee left a copy of "The Ecology of Commerce" on his desk. Written by Paul Hawken, an entrepreneur as well as an environmentalist, the book is not your typical anti-industrial screed. Though full of gloomy (and sometimes overwrought) predictions, it advances a thoughtful plan for business to help itself and the planet at the same time.

The essential goal, Mr. Hawken argues, is controlling the creation of harmful wastes instead of their disposal. This calls for mimicking nature, the most efficient system on earth, where everything's waste is something else's food.

If this strikes you as so much green do-gooder drivel, consider what commerce really is. "The core function of business is to economize," says William Frederick, who was business dean at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s. His landmark book, "Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation," details how business historically has attained its greatest economies by conforming to the "ecologizing" principles of nature.

In Interface's case,. that means turning employees and environmental consultants loose on every 'process (and providing bonuses to those who came up with winners). A new tufting method has cut nylon use 10% Old fibers are "combed" rather than melted for recycling. Certain yarns are substituted with hemp and flax, a step toward carpeting that is both "harvestable" and compostable. Processing water is treated for golfcourse irrigation. Massive electric motors are jump-started with gravity-feed systems rather than huge jolts of electricity. The list goes on.

Looking at waste really forces You to look at how your systems are designed," says James Hartzfeld, a top Interface official. The crackdown has saved Interface a stunning $25 million since 1995, with another $50 million expected the next two years.

THE MARKETING benefits are even bigger. Everybody wants to do business with a green vendor, especially a low-cost green vendor. Gap Inc. ordered carpet for its new Bay Area headquarters building because Interface was the low bidder, "but the fact that they were asked to bid was based on their environmental record." a Gap spokesman says. In some eases - a deal involving Southern California Gas, for instance -Interface installs carpeting under a "perpetual lease," removing worn carpet tiles little by little for recycling into new.

Employees are nature, too. In an industry infamous for bad working conditions, Interface's broadloom mill here is muffled, odor-free and bathed in sunlight from three-story windows. Instead of a manicured and chemically enhanced lawn, the plant is landscaped with wild grasses and black-eyed susans. Joyce LaValle, who runs the plant, takes nearly 1,000 potential customers through the site each year. "If they come into this building I've got them hands down," she says, "especially if they've been in other plants."

Reaching $1 billion in revenue last year, Interface has regained world-wide leadership. Many obstacles remain in its goal of becoming 100% sustainable; solar power, for instance, remains uneconomical with today's oil price. But Mr. Anderson is convinced that will change. Even now, the company is making more progress than any regulator would dare to require.

Even if the doomsayers of environmentalism are overly pessimistic, we obviously can't consume the finite forever. Only business can create a renewable future, and only by following nature's own example.

Can business make a healthier planet?