"Business is the largest, most powerful and most pervasive, institution on earth. It's incumbent on business to take the leadership on sustainability."
Ray Anderson, an industrial engineer by training, is the founder and chairman, of Interface Inc., the world’s largest commercial modular carpet manufacturer. Since 1994, he has led a vast change programme within Interface to make it a sustainable corporation. In 1997, Mr Anderson was named co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. His book Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise — The Interface Model, explains both his motivations and the pragmatic steps Interface is taking to achieve its goals.
www.interfaceinc.com
Mr Anderson has led Interface to embrace whole systems design and provides an inspiring example of a re-imagined business that also makes pragmatic business sense. Interface Inc has reinvented its business model with the intent of attaining “closed loop recycling and has set a definite time limit through it’s Mission Zero Goal of a Zero footprint by the Year 2020.
InterfaceNZ is already recycling carpet tile and has a typical recycled content by weight of 50% in most of the carpet tiles it sells in New Zealand.