Sustainability at Scale: Changing the World One Carpet Tile at a Time
Or, how I’ve ended up working for one of the world’s largest carpet companies.
Doctor, spy, foreign correspondent… carpet manufacturer? It never topped the list of things I wanted to be when I was younger. But after a year of job-slash-soul searching that’s exactly where I’ve ended up: at Interface, the world’s largest producer of carpet tiles.
As of last month, I am an On Purpose Associate. Masquerading as a social enterprise career development programme, On Purpose is actually a gateway into the carpet industry for those who don’t have a degree in industrial engineering. Interface is the first of two six-month work placements I’ll be doing over the coming year.
‘But how does a billion-dollar US-listed modular carpet tile manufacturer count as a social enterprise?’, I hear you cry. It doesn’t — and neither does it claim to. On Purpose placements aren’t only with ‘actual’ social enterprises — which, for the sake of argument, we can define as businesses trading for a social or environmental purpose. Placement hosts include a range of purpose-driven organizations, from socially-minded businesses to commercially-minded charities.
A NASDAQ-listed company with over 3,000 employees and net revenue of over $1 billion, it’s safe to say that Interface is at the more corporate end of that spectrum. It is also a pioneer of sustainable innovation, recently ranking alongside Patagonia and Unilever as one of the world’s most sustainable brands. For more than 20 years Interface has been working towards Mission Zero: a commitment to eliminate any negative impact the company may have on the environment by 2020. Not only that, but Interface will shortly be revealing its next mission for after 2020: ‘Climate Take Back’, which will move beyond mitigating its carbon footprint to actually reversing it.
As someone who dropped chemistry at 15 and has spent their career so far working for companies where you could fit all the employees in one room, my first six weeks at Interface have been pretty eye-opening. I’m learning a lot about carpets — but I’m learning even more about how large corporations work. Which is why I’ve found myself questioning my assumptions about how best to promote innovation and drive change. Didn’t think carpets could change the world? Think again — and read on.
Carpets, if you didn’t know, are made from plastic. Plastics, as I’m sure you do know, are not great for the environment. Every year the plastics industry accounts for 6% of total global oil consumption — as much as the entire aviation industry. This consumption includes the oil used to make the plastic feedstock in the first place, as well as the fuel needed for processing and manufacturing further down the supply chain. Made mostly from nylon, PVC and bitumen, carpets are an extremely petroleum-intensive business.
“If Interface wants to eliminate its environmental impact, why doesn’t it stop selling carpets altogether and close down its business?”, I hear you cry again. Call me a carpet-lobbyist, but I believe it’s this kind of reasoning that prevents change. By creating a false dichotomy that presents our only choices as plastic-free or plastic-free-for-all, we don’t get anywhere. If Interface did decide to shut down its manufacturing sites, storage houses and showrooms overnight (and I’d love to be a fly on the wall during that board meeting) its competitors would gleefully swoop in to fill the gap and the carpet industry would carry on unchanged.
There is, of course, a third way. Interface can change the way that it makes carpet — and here is where the scope for impact really lies. What if Interface can grow its business selling carpet that is made from 100% recycled materials in factories that run on 100% renewable energy and generate zero waste? Then the possibility of reducing the damaging environmental effects of the plastics industry actually starts to seem viable.
Interface is part of a growing movement of companies moving towards a ‘closed-loop’ industrial cycle. This is a core element of the circular economy: an industrial economy that produces no waste and pollution and which is restorative and regenerative by design. It is the antithesis of the linear take-make-waste model on which our current systems are built.
Like it or not, as individuals living in post-industrial societies we rely on and perpetuate the current industrial and economic systems. Not everyone can (or wants to) move to a self-sufficient village commune — but even if it were feasible to boycott any form of large-scale industry, would it be the answer? Should we be setting ourselves the overwhelming task of dismantling an entire system, or should we focus our energy on how we improve the elements of the system that we know best?
Interface has set itself hugely ambitious targets. With four years left to hit ‘Mission Zero’, its manufacturing operations run on 84% renewable energy and 50% of its raw materials are derived from recycled or bio-based sources. These figures measure Interface’s progress across its global operations and product range. It might be a lot easier to create a premium product range featuring 100% recycled materials for an easy marketing win. But true sustainability is not about creating niche ‘eco’ products — it is about integrating sustainable practices into mainstream supply chains.
Interface is not an ‘eco carpet’ company targeting only an environmentally-savvy customer base. Its main clients are large corporates, hotel chains or universities, for whom sustainability is not always a key purchasing factor. Why bother pushing the sustainability angle if not all your customers are asking for it? Because sustainable products will only be adopted on a scale large enough to have wider impact if they can compete in the market on quality and cost.
As we all know, ‘eco’ is all too often a lifestyle choice — and an expensive one at that. Is it not more important that sustainable practices are implemented incrementally across a wider sector, even if it takes longer? This is a key issue if we are to go from making sustainability a lifestyle choice to a lifestyle default. Carpets might not be the first product we associate with sustainability, but that’s what we should be working towards — a world where sustainability is taken for granted rather than flaunted as the USP.
Another big surprise for me was that Interface was even doing this. Companies who brandish lofty sustainability goals are often met with skepticism — and for good reason, as they rarely have to prove anything. What makes Interface different — aside from the fact that its actions speak louder than its words — is the story of how Mission Zero began.
Interface was founded in the early 1970s by Ray Anderson, an engineer and entrepreneur. Anderson was the first to introduce modular carpet tiles to the US market as an alternative to traditional wall-to-wall carpets. As the open-plan office grew in popularity, so too did Interface’s sales.
By the mid 1990s Anderson was nearing a cosy retirement with a multinational, multimillion-dollar company to his name. He may well have headed straight into it, had he not been asked to include in an upcoming talk some lines about ‘Interface’s position on the environment’. Interface customers had started to ask sales reps what the company was doing for the environment, and the sales reps were looking to their senior management for answers.
Anderson had never given any thought to the answer and picked up a book in the hope of finding some quick soundbites. Instead, he found himself staying up all night, engrossed in the The Ecology of Commerce. The book, written by Paul Hawken, outlined business’s destructive effect on the planet. More importantly, Hawken also argued that business is uniquely placed to promote environmental restoration. Anderson later described how he wept as he read, horrified that his lifetime’s work posed a direct threat to the future of his grandchildren, not to mention the rest of human civilization.
Anderson became determined that through Interface he would not only right these wrongs, but become living proof that Hawken’s vision of business leading environmental change was possible. At the talk, instead of paying the usual lip service he shocked his audience by unveiling his radical new strategy for Interface, which would later be known as ‘Mission Zero’ (for a taster of Anderson’s oratory skills, click here).
Through working with entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs over the past year, I’ve drunk my fair share of the startup kool aid. I’ve bought into the romance of disrupting from the outside and remained fairly skeptical of large businesses who claim to innovate. It is true that corporate structure does not lend itself well to risk-taking, agility or lean thinking. But what corporates do have that most startups lack is scale — and the implications of this should not be underestimated.
As a market leader, Interface has leverage over its suppliers to encourage them to raise their own standards. Many of Interface’s competitors have adopted similar sustainability practices, raising the standards of the sector as a whole. Interface’s vast customer base, whether they are environmentally-conscious or not, form a huge audience for these messages. When Interface speaks, people listen. Which is why, as part of ‘Climate Take Back’, the company plans to hold a series of conferences later this year engaging customers, suppliers and other like-minded companies to join the mission.
My favourite part of Interface’s story is that it makes a great counterexample to arguments that sustainability is incompatible with ‘business sense’. By the time Anderson published his second book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist in 2009, Interface had increased its sales by 66%, doubled its earnings and raised its profit margins. And if Interface can achieve this by undergoing an abrupt strategic and cultural u-turn 20 years into its existence, then no other company or sector is too ‘far gone’ to change.
Winning big business over to true sustainability — which goes beyond CSR programmes to a radical, strategic commitment at the core of a company’s activity — is undoubtedly a huge challenge. Even if you’ve got the will, changing practice across different regions and hundreds of different divisions is extremely complex. But when you achieve that change, the potential for impact is arguably greater than 99% of startups could ever hope to achieve.
Driving social and environmental change from within corporations is possible and represents a huge opportunity. Working on the outside may be more fun, and we still need disrupters to keep big businesses on its toes. But we must also target our efforts on the places where we can guarantee scale of impact.
We can’t afford to be cynical. We should expect and demand that big business will take radical action — not only to mitigate the damage it causes, but to lead by example and aim for a net positive impact.
