Portland, ME, March 28--Ray Anderson introduced himself to an audience at Colby College in Waterville this week as an "industrialist," according to the Portland Press Herald.
The newspaper said the word has an old-fashioned ring, bringing to mind 19th-century textile magnates, Henry Ford establishing production lines for his Model T and John D. Rockefeller putting together Standard Oil. Factories belching toxic smoke stand in the rear of these mental images.
Anderson, in fact, said the newspaper, spent much of his career in that vein. He built Interface Inc., which is headquartered in Georgia and operates a plant in Guilford, into an international powerhouse in the carpeting and interior furnishings market.
The company does close to $900 million in annual sales. "I speak as an industrialist," he said. "Some would say a radical industrialist, but someone who is as competitive as anyone you know."
A little more than a decade ago, though, Anderson picked up another moniker: environmentalist. That dual role brought him to Colby as keynote speaker for the school's 54th Leadership Institute.
The annual event is designed to give Maine businesspeople, academics, politicians and others a chance to learn about and discuss issues of public concern. This year's topic: how Maine can build a "sustainable" economy.
Anderson's focus on sustainable business practices began a decade ago when customers started asking about Interface's environmental vision, he said. The company didn't have one.
"In my whole life, I had not given a single thought to what my company had taken from the earth," Anderson said.
That blind spot disappeared, he said, when he read a book on the topic -- "The Ecology of Commerce" by Paul Hawken. Its message, that an environment can be broken beyond repair and that industry is crucial to creating change, came as an "epiphanal moment" and hit Anderson like "a spear in the chest," he said.
"I got it. I was plundering the earth," Anderson said. "That's not a legacy I want to leave behind."
From that day forward, Anderson made environmental stewardship a core value of his company. The idea is to strive for zero environmental impact from his firm, a mission he's dubbed "climbing mount sustainability
The firm now looks at everything from an environmental standpoint, whether that is waste, product ingredients, energy use, facilities management and, in the future, the impact of every action taken from the moment a raw material is extracted to the end of the product's life.
"The amazing thing is that it has been incredibly good for business," Anderson said of the company's effort.
Not only are customers happy about the company's environmental commitment, but, he said, the company is constantly finding ways to cut costs by redesigning products and work processes.
That experience puts the lie to the argument that a business needs to choose between profit and environmentalism. And that's good, he argued, because only the power of the marketplace can help keep the world's environment from sliding down "the long, long slippery slope" toward collapse.
"The ethical thing to do, the right thing to do is driven by enlightened self-interest," he said.
