Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Editorial: Restore the Earth; turn green
An industrialist -- a carpetmaker, no less -- is on a crusade for sustainability. If business is to drive this revolution, consumers can help.
From the RoundTable blog
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Roanokers should be familiar with the idea of sustainable building. The 2004 C2C -- "cradle to cradle" -- home design competition in the city drew 625 entries from architects around the world. Each attempted to envision an eco-friendly, affordable home that could be a model for the future.
Actually building such homes on a large scale will be far easier if the corporate world starts producing more leaders like Ray Anderson.
And it will if consumers demand it.
Anderson is the founder and head of Interface, a carpet tile company, just the sort of manufacturing operation that lays waste to the natural environment: Petroleum products are the raw material of synthetic carpet, and the process of making it uses lots of energy and water.
Further, when consumers replace carpeting, they pull it up and toss it -- ultimately into landfills "where it lasts probably 20,000 years," Anderson acknowledges.
Anderson was profiled recently by The New York Times, where he explained his transformation from ordinary corporate executive -- worried only about the bottom line -- to an evangelist for sustainable industry.
He started his journey in 1994, when his sales force asked him to give them talking points to respond to customers' questions about environmental issues. In search of something more inspiring to say than "we comply with the law" -- which Interface did -- Anderson educated himself about environmental issues.
What he found, he told the newspaper, was that "I was running a company that was plundering the Earth. I thought, 'Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!' It was a spear in the chest."
That "spear" was a prod that led him and his colleagues to set a deadline of 2020 for Interface to become a sustainable industry -- one that extracts nothing from the earth that cannot be recycled or regenerated and doesn't harm the biosphere.
He is on the same page as Roanoke's C2C Home project, inspired by internationally known architect William McDonough, who talks about revolutionizing commerce as a "cradle to cradle," rather than cradle to grave, activity. The idea is not simply to do less harm to the Earth, but to be restorative of it.
The first home to be built out of Roanoke's C2C competition is nearing completion on Gilmer Avenue. Making the idea real took longer than expected. But success will build upon success if the idea takes hold.
Anderson figures Interface is "about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be" -- and much of that progress has been made by simply eliminating waste or buying carbon credits by planting trees. Cheap, renewable energy and recyclable nylon, maybe even carbohydrate- rather than carbon-based material, are much tougher goals, yet necessary if he is to realize his dream of heading a "restorative" industry.
The more such industries become the norm, the more homes and other buildings will turn green. Anderson says only business and industry is powerful and pervasive enough to reverse humankind's plundering ways. Business and industry responds to its customers. That would be us.
