How green is my carpet?
July 7, 2007
While some companies lead the way on reducing carbon footprints, others seek environmental kudos in a mirage of marketing, writes Wendy Frew.
When the US carpet king Ray Anderson stripped his company down to the underlay in a devastating audit of its effect on the Earth, it made him feel weak with dread. “Really, this cannot go on indefinitely, can it?” he wrote in his book Mid-Course Correction. “Does anyone rationally think it can? My company’s technologies and those of every other company I know of anywhere, in their present forms, are plundering the Earth. This cannot go on and on and on.”
The facts, gathered in 1995, revealed waste on a colossal scale. To make about $US800 million worth of carpet tiles a year, thecompany, InterfaceFlor, together with its suppliers, extracted from the Earth and processed a staggering 556 million kilograms of material. Out of that raw material, 363 million kilograms came from coal, oil and natural gas.
“Now here’s the thing that gagged me the most,” said Anderson in an account of his company’s efforts to transform itself from corporate plunderer to sustainable role model. “Roughly two-thirds of that 800 million pounds [363 million kilograms] of irreplaceable, non-renewable, exhaustible, precious natural resource was burned up – two thirds! – to produce the energy to convert the other one-third, along with the 400 million pounds [182 million kilograms] of inorganic material, into products.”
Anderson, who has been an industrialist since the 1950s, doesn’t hide from making money out of manufacturing carpet or from being proud of it. But his epiphany about the damage his products were doing to the environment propelled him in a new direction. Everything his company did had to change, he decided.
Anderson went on to radically transform the way InterfaceFlor did business – from its economic assumptions and costings, the materials it used, the suppliers it dealt with and its arrangements with customers.
More than a decade later, his company has significantly cut its effect on the environment though it still has a long way to go.
See the rest at
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/how-green-is-my-carpet/2007/07/06/1183351454778.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
Anderson, Ray (1998) Mid Course Correction; Towards a Sustainable Enterprise: the Interface Model ISBN: 9780964595354
Buy it at your local bookstore and help employ a real person,
online at Angus and Robertson in Australia
