ABOUT 14 years’ ago Interface’s founder and chairman Ray Anderson had an epiphany – he wanted the carpet manufacturer to continue to grow but to have zero impact on the environment.
One of Australia’s drivers of the company’s subsequent ‘2020 vision’ in Australia, Rob Coombs, recently addressed an audience in Sydney.
“I’d rather be labelled a green ‘doer’ than a green thinker”, said Rob Coombs when he presented on Interface’s progress in adopting sustainable business practices, at the Green Building Council’s event on August 11th.
Coombs, who has been with the carpet manufacturer (primarily modular carpet) for 17 years’, is the president and chief executive of the Asia Pacific region. He’s been there since the beginning of Interface’s transformation from a self confessed “plunderer of the Earth” to an enterprise that is increasingly more sustainable within its environment.
So how has a materials- and energy-intensive business like Interface managed to reduce its greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by a staggering 88 per cent despite growth in the business, and reduce waste to an amount equal to $400mn, keeping 52,000 tonnes of carpet out of landfill?
“In terms of carbon footprint the most important thing is to use less,” said Rob Coombs. One of the biggest enemies to this goal is building standards.
“So many building standards are based around quantity of stuff, how much you use in the product. That’s often driven by vested interests, and chances are that those vested interests have inferior products,” said Coombs.
He cites one example of an early initiative to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. An engineer asked the question, “What would happen if we took four per cent of the yarn out of the product?”
After investigation, Interface calculated that the saving in energy this move could achieve was enough to run the company’s production plant for two years. “This had a huge upstream multiplier effect,” said Coombs.
“What Interface does within its own walls constitutes about 30 per cent of carbon footprint of the product and 60 per cent comes from the suppliers of raw materials.
“So, if you aren’t working with upstream suppliers you’ve got no hope of getting there, and downstream as well.”
In the course of becoming a more sustainable business, Interface has put pressure on its supply base and has moved away from the largest supply of nylon globally because “they wouldn’t go in the same direction.”
“We went with suppliers who could offer post consumer yarn which shows that through purchasing power you can drive change,” said Coombs.
After much persistence the company was also able to achieve progress with its product stewardship, taking more responsibility for the product at the end of its life. This came through discovering a process for recycling post consumer nylon when the original investor of nylon, Dupont, “couldn’t” or “wouldn’t”.
In 1994, before the company’s focus on sustainability, it was using something like 1.3 billion pounds of materials to produce $800mn worth of sales. Around 50 per cent of materials were burned and a large part of the balance was wasted.
“The business was fundamentally working against nature and therefore fundamentally working against itself in a way,” said Coombs.
It was only recently that Interface felt confident to start promoting its “green” credentials on a broad scale, to share with others what they can now call, “the business case for sustainability.”
“Over time we’ve learnt that the triple bottom line thing is not a compromise, it’s mutually supportive,” said Coombs.
“It has lowered our costs, through less waste, lowered our energy usage, we design much better products…and most importantly we attract and retain people that I don’t think we would otherwise.
“More customers are asking us to secure their business by confirming our sustainability credentials, so if you’re one of the early movers you win more business,” said Coombs.
“It’s not a bad business case in our view.” Interface is aiming to become sustainable in all its dimensions by 2020, or what it calls the “five Ps” – people, profit, product, process and the planet.
“The reason that a business wants to become sustainable is critical,” said Coombs. “Because it sustains you for the length of the journey – it’s an extremely long journey and if you enter into it for the wrong reasons you won’t last.”
The three core beliefs which Interface used to commence its sustainability program are:
- the carrying capacity of the earth is fundamentally unable to support the way we have bee producing and consuming over the past 100 years. If it’s not sustainable for the planet it’s not sustainable for the business –
- since the Industrial Revolution, business has been operating on a model that is completely out of step of nature. The “take, make, waste” process is contrary to nature which is cyclic, not linear, and uses its waste as fuel for the next cycle.
- business has created the problem and is probably the only institution that is able, and wealthy enough, to fix it or to invest in fixing it.
“After having formed these beliefs, after having initiated a set of values around them, we approached it like you would any other business problem,” said Coombs.
“We define the end vision along the lines of a mountain climb, trying to climb Mount Sustainable and our seven strategies were the seven fronts of the mountain. From that we developed action plans and measurement systems.”
The seven “fronts” that Interface started out with are still in place today and have not been changed. The first one is to eliminate any form of waste, “the financial kicker that funds everything else you do.”
Other strategies include using only renewable energy sources, engaging people in the process and closing the loop on material flows.
In some parts of the world Interface has been able to tap local landfill to help supply energy to its factories. Its biggest factory, located in Georgia USA, was able to work with local authorities to access methane from the local landfill which now supplies up to 10 per cent of its energy.
In Australia, the business has grown output four times in the last 14 years and reduced its ghg emissions in absolute terms by 25 per cent. The company as a whole has reduced its use of fossil fuel by 45 per cent during the same period, whilst sales increased by 50 per cent.
“How far have we come?,” asked Coombs, “…we’re about half way there in terms of years and roughly half way there in terms of achievement.
“There’s a long way to go but from half way up the mountain the view’s pretty good.”
Interface in Australia, www.interfaceflor.com.au