Sustainable Business Development - Past Events

The Interface Story
Steve Macready, CEO of Interface Australia Pty Ltd

The Journey Towards a Sustainable Future
Environmental Initiatives, what have we done and why?

Interface is a resource intensive company, whose largest divisions are petroleum-dependent. With Sales offices in 110 countries and manufacturing facilities at 26 sites on four continents. With sales over US $ 1 billion and over 7,500 employees, our Company has a significant impact on this planet's commerce and ecology.

For more than 20 years we operated our businesses with an environmental mission that called for basic compliance with government regulations. Now, led by our Chairman and CEO, Ray Anderson, we have a new vision: to become a leader in Industrial ecology by first becoming a sustainable corporation and then eventually a restorative enterprise.
Business is the world's largest, wealthiest and most pervasive institution on Earth. It is responsible for most of the damage and must now take the lead in directing the world away from collapse and towards sustainability and restoration.

At the conference he gave a speech that surprised him, stunned us and galvanised us all into action. He challenged us to convert Interface into a sustainable business and then become restorative, putting more back into nature than that which we take out.

Ultimately Interface knows that any positive impact on the environment won't come from just one company understanding and achieving sustainability, but from a world full of sustainable enterprises. By example, Interface believes that we can influence the practices of other companies. Within our own organisation, we have laid out a path - on seven ambitious fronts designed to take us to sustainability. Our concern for the environment is not a short term initiative designed to improve our image but a strategic change necessary to guide our corporation through the 21st Century.

The Path to Sustainability
1. Eliminating Waste through Quest - (Quality Utilizing Employee Suggestions and Teamwork) We will waste nothing. QUEST is fundamental to our achievement of this goal, and by involving everyone we have seen significant results. QUEST is a carefully designed points system that benchmarks each Interface division on waste reduction. Since we started we have over 400 Sustainability initiatives active world-wide. We have saved over $113 million in just the last 6 years. This programme involves all 7,500 associates. We want to eliminate the concept of waste, not just incrementally reduce it. Zero waste may be years away yet though - the other six steps will help us get there.

2. Benign Emissions - We will emit nothing harmful into the environment. Eliminating toxic emissions will lead us to our zero emissions goal. In manufacturing terms that means that whatever is emitted from our processes must somehow be diverted back into them. We have counted all our stacks, we have started to eliminate them, but we need help.
Towards this end we are researching the concept of 100% compostable carpet with no emissions or residues. Also we are working upstream with our suppliers to prevent harmful substances initially entering our factories.

3. Developing Renewable Energy Sources - We will use renewable energy sources. We have begun by improving our overall energy efficiency. We have made significant improvements and we are also investigating alternate energy sources. We now buy 100% renewable electricity at our two factories in Yorkshire, UK. In a key new initiative we are treating fossil fuel energy as a waste that is to be eliminated through efficiencies and shifts to renewable energy sources.

4. Closed Loop Recycling - Industrial systems are take-make-waste systems. Natural, cyclical, living systems are destroyed when resources are depleted and waste accumulates in the biosphere. We will use renewable materials. We are developing the technologies to use renewable materials so that we do not deplete the stock of natural capital. If we succeed we may never have to take another drop of oil from the earth. Today some of our plants are recycling carpet backing scrap into raw material for the manufacturing process. We are developing what could soon become a high percentage post-industrial, post consumer recycled spun nylon carpet. We want to influence all our suppliers to follow this route.

5. Minimising Transportation Impacts - We will use efficient means of transport all over the world - in planes, trains, trucks and ships. We have reduced packaging and product weight without loss of quality. In the UK we have reduced our fleet from 15 lorries to 9 by utilising the 'Hub and Spoke' distribution method, minimising the time spent travelling empty.

6. Sensitivity Hook-up - Associates (employees) need more involvement and empowerment, easy to say, but how do you achieve it? We have put all associates through a waste elimination package called QUEST, and are dedicated to being a learning organisation. We've cultivated experiential learning in all employees through outward bound courses that develop trust and encourages them to take risks We are also committed to putting all associates through sustainability training, using the principles of The Natural Step.

7. Redesign Commerce - We will pioneer sustainable commerce within the carpet industry. In the USA and now the UK we have pilots for the Evergreen Lease. Customers pay monthly for the value they receive from the product - colour, texture, warmth, acoustics, underfoot comfort, cleanliness etc. Interface retains the responsibility for manufacturing, installing, and maintaining the product over its lifetime. We would selectively replace the carpet and rotate the tiles one tile at a time and more importantly, we retain the landfill liability for the replaced carpet, converting it into a valuable asset through recycling or re-use.

We also have mass customisation of our new product ranges enables design flexibility, style, quality and delivery, without the costly investment in stocks.
We are also developing a scheme called Re-Entry. The idea is simple, some organisations replace their carpets before all the carpet is worn out.
What Re-Entry would do is go into these organisations, lift up the carpet, sort into that which is worn out (heavy traffic paths), and send these for re-claim to energy or recycling (when the technology is fully developed).
The rest can be refurbished through machines we developed and then leased back to customers who would not normally buy this grade of carpet.

Examples of environmental achievements to date, using these principles.
1. By reducing the edging either side of the carpet that helps it run through the machine, by only 2cm in total, we have saved $800,000 per year in the three UK sites alone, and reduced waste by 1% of raw material input. Through the QUEST system we're now sharing that best practice throughout the company.

2. By requesting that our suppliers switch to pallets the same size as we send our products out on, we have reduced our purchase and disposal of pallets by 5,000 per year, which saves us $24,000.

3. By using thinner boxes (which don't compromise tile quality, because we had previously overspecified) we have reduced the raw material input and saved $160,000 per year (we use 1 million boxes per year).

4. 150 tonnes of waste yarn per year are sent for downcycling into underfelt from UK sites, diverting them from landfill. That waste generates an income stream of around $25 per tonne.

5. In Scherpenzeel, reducing our water consumption by 65% is a major plus for the environment and saved us $2500.

6. By reducing the energy usage on a drying line in Scherpenzeel we reduced our natural gas usage by 50,000 cubic metres and save $14,000 per year on a $9,000 investment.

7. During recent major refurbishment of a UK manufacturing site we recycled as many materials as possible, glass, slates, stone, wood etc.
What could not be re-used or recycled we ground up to use as foundations.

8. At the new office building in Scherpenzeel, Holland, we radically improved heat retention and lighting design to minimise energy use. A large photovoltaic array also provides a proportion of the office's electrical needs.