This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of Interface, the storied Atlanta-based flooring firm and a pioneer in what it takes to transition a producing firm to change into a sustainable, even restorative, enterprise. That anniversary in itself is noteworthy: The common lifespan of corporations listed within the S&P 500 is effectively beneath 20 years, in response to Innosight, down from 30 to 35 years within the Nineteen Seventies and round 60 years within the Fifties.

That longevity can also be noteworthy due to the corporate’s sustainability journey, launched almost 30 years in the past by its iconoclastic founder and chairman, Ray Anderson. Not many corporations can hint their sustainability commitments that far again, not to mention nonetheless be seen as a pacesetter.

This week’s milestone led me to verify in with Laurel M. Hurd, Interface’s CEO, who, at age 52, is barely barely older than the corporate she leads. She joined Interface a yr in the past after greater than twenty years on the client items firm Newell Manufacturers, purveyor of dozens of well-known manufacturers, together with Elmer’s, Rubbermaid, Coleman and Sharpie.

The story of Anderson and Interface is well-known to most sustainability veterans. For these newer to the sphere, the gist is that this: In 1973, Anderson, simply shy of his fortieth birthday and after almost a decade and a half within the carpet enterprise, based Interface to provide the primary free-lay carpet tiles in America. His timing was beautiful: Computer systems have been simply coming into the office, with all of the cabling and air flow methods they demanded. Modular carpet tiles enabled corporations to extra simply reconfigure workplace flooring to accommodate all that underfoot infrastructure. Interface took off.

What we’re making an attempt to do is really be restorative. That is a large, huge ambition for a world manufacturing firm.

About 20 years later, Anderson skilled what he later described as a “spear within the chest” second: After studying Paul Hawken’s e book, “The Ecology of Commerce,” and after fielding repeated buyer and worker queries about Interface’s environmental applications, Anderson got here to comprehend that his was an unsustainable firm, based mostly largely on his carpeting’s two principal elements: petroleum-based nylon, used for the carpet fibers, and polyvinyl chloride, one other petroleum spinoff, for its backing. He famously declared himself a “sinner” and “plunderer of the earth” and his firm “a thief from future generations.” (“Sooner or later, folks like me will go to jail,” he as soon as declared.)

Staying the course

That epiphany launched Anderson and Interface on a journey to change into the world’s most sustainable firm. Lengthy earlier than anybody had uttered the phrases “round economic system,” Anderson had a imaginative and prescient to take used carpeting and switch it again into new carpeting. In 1994, at age 60, this Southern industrialist turned the poster baby for CEOs who “received” sustainability and have been actively integrating it into firm operations and product technique. In 1997, Interface launched Mission Zero, which included a pledge to finish the use and manufacturing of virgin supplies. Anderson gave scores of speeches a yr touting his imaginative and prescient.

When Anderson died in 2011 at age 77, many people puzzled whether or not and the way his imaginative and prescient would endure. Would Interface keep the course or revert, as so many corporations do beneath management adjustments, to a distinct or extra standard technique?

Greater than a decade — and a number of other CEOs — later, the corporate has stayed the course, and even upped the ante. In November, for instance, Interface introduced it had change into a Carbon Impartial Enterprise, assembly the PAS 2060 benchmark created by the British Requirements Establishment. In its announcement, Interface mentioned it had “remodeled its factories, merchandise and provide chain — together with utilizing modern new carbon-storing uncooked supplies — to dramatically cut back its carbon emissions.” It allowed that “verified emissions credit are essential to stability emissions that Interface has not but been capable of cut back. In the end, the corporate intends to stability its carbon affect with out them.”

By 2040, the corporate goals to be carbon unfavorable.

In contemplating whether or not to take the helm at Interface — at this time, a $1.3 billion (fiscal yr 2022 income) enterprise with manufacturing vegetation on 4 continents — Laurel Hurd noticed an organization with a powerful legacy, a daring imaginative and prescient and an excessive amount of untapped potential.

“What we’re making an attempt to do is really be restorative,” she instructed me. “That is a large, huge ambition for a world manufacturing firm.”

The corporate is on its manner. Based on the corporate’s 2021 ESG report, its most up-to-date, between 1996 and 2021, Interface decreased greenhouse gasoline emissions by 96 % per unit of output, reduce water use by 86 % and despatched 85 % much less waste to landfill. Simply over three-fourths of the power used at its international manufacturing websites got here from renewables. Fifty % of its uncooked materials feedstocks are bio-based or recycled.

Life after Ray

However past these information factors, I used to be curious how Hurd considered the trail ahead: Has the proverbial low-hanging fruit been largely harvested? What are the alternatives forward? And the way a lot is Anderson’s imaginative and prescient nonetheless part of the corporate and its tradition, even a dozen years after his passing?

When Hurd arrived at Interface final yr, she was fast to find that the corporate’s sustainability commitments have been key to its innovation pipeline and supply-chain relationships. “I did not know what I might discover once I got here right here,” she mentioned. “And it is so built-in within the material of the whole lot that we do. Sitting by a gathering the place we’re speaking about our science-based targets — the place are we at this time by product class, by plant location, by provider, and what are our plans to get to the place we have to? That solely works if our innovation roadmap, our provider partnerships and our product improvement are all aligned to get there. It is holistic, and it is true to the core of the corporate.”

The fantastic thing about Ray was that he was about how we wanted to win available in the market.

One of many comparatively few unfavorable critiques of Anderson, who was typically held in excessive regard by each his enterprise friends and environmentalists, was that his seemingly singular give attention to sustainability was at occasions a distraction for the corporate, notably throughout market downturns, of which there have been a number of throughout Anderson’s tenure. The corporate’s inventory value tanked throughout these dips, notably in 2003 and 2009, as recessionary forces led Interface’s prospects to trim their actual property expenditures. Even at this time, amid the post-pandemic realignment of workplace house, Interface’s inventory (Nasdaq: TILE) is close to its 10-year low. (The web site Searching for Alpha lately dubbed it “extraordinarily low-cost at present costs.”)

Anderson, in fact, disagreed adamantly with the notion that sustainability was a distraction from the pursuit of earnings and productiveness, arguing that Interface’s sustainability efforts really saved the corporate throughout robust occasions. “We wouldn’t be right here if we hadn’t taken this path,” he instructed me in 2004.

I requested Hurd, who by no means met Anderson, how this aligned together with her personal expertise on the firm.

“The fantastic thing about Ray was that he was about how we wanted to win available in the market, and the way we wanted to push ahead in an entire new manner from a sustainability perspective,” she mentioned. “And people two issues go arm and arm.”

It issues greater than ever at this time, she added. “The sweetness proper now could be that now we have a bonus as a result of carbon has by no means mattered extra to our prospects. Ray was speaking about it earlier than anybody else. So, the enterprise affect of what he was doing was possibly much less related to the viewers, the place now, my gosh, we’re partnering with like-minded prospects and provide companions, and everybody needs to be taught from us. However additionally they wish to assist our merchandise and our model as a result of we’re thus far forward. So, in that manner, it is virtually simpler for us now than it was for Ray, as a result of it is such a core a part of our enterprise. And it is a part of how we win available in the market.”

And Anderson nonetheless looms massive, she mentioned. “He is the hero that continues to stay on within the firm on daily basis. And I really feel a private duty to do him proud. I imply, he was such a pioneer and put his firm on the road in a time when no one was doing it. When you have been in our constructing right here, you’d see movies of him, you’d see photos of him; he is in all places right here. He’s the lifeblood, and it is our job to proceed to do him proud.”

I requested Hurd what Anderson would possibly suppose have been he to go to Interface at this time. “I feel he’d be rattling proud,” she responded. “However I feel he would say ‘Guys, you are simply getting began.’ He’d be extremely pleased with the corporate that he constructed and but would not be in any respect happy.”

Thanks for studying. You could find my previous articles right here. Additionally, I invite you to observe me on Twitter and LinkedIn, subscribe to my Monday morning e-newsletter, GreenBuzz, from which this was reprinted, and hearken to GreenBiz 350, my weekly podcast, co-hosted with Heather Clancy.