Q & A with Ray Anderson: Green Business Is Good Business
In the past 50 years, Ray Anderson became a highly successful, wealthy man by transforming the commercial carpet tile business. After introducing carpet tiles to North America, he started a his own company, Interface Inc. He set ambitious goals: grow the company to surpass $1 billion in annual earnings, aggressively acquire companies to give commercial carpet tiles a global reach and successfully take the company public. Now he has embarked on an even larger challenge. For the last 14 years, he’s focused on transforming carpet tile manufacturing from a wasteful, 19th Century fossil fuel-based business into a 21st Century environmentally benign closed-loop system drawing upon renewable raw materials.
ENR: Starting in 1994, you moved Interface toward a sustainable business model. How has the effort been going?