Inside Interface's bold new mission to achieve 'Climate Take Back' | GreenBiz - 0 views
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shared by Del Birmingham on 06 Jun 16
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Interface reconstituted its Dream Team, “a collection of experts and friends who have joined with me to remake Interface into a leader of sustainability,” as Anderson wrote in the company’s 1997 sustainability report.The original team included Sierra Club executive director David Brower; Buckminster Fuller devotee Bill Browning, then with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI); community and social activist Bernadette Cozart; author and entrepreneur Hawken; Amory Lovins, RMI co-founder and chief scientist; L. Hunter Lovins, RMI’s other co-founder; architect and designer William McDonough; John Picard, a pioneering consultant in green building and sustainability; Jonathan Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future; Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, a sustainability framework; and Walter Stahel a resource efficiency expert. (Additional members would be added over the years, including Biomimicry author Janine Benyus.)
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One example is Net-Works. Launched in 2012, it helps turn discarded fishing nets into the raw materials for nylon carpeting in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.
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But Ray Anderson’s sustainability vision was always about more than just a “green manufacturing plant.” He wanted Interface to be a shining example, an ideal to which other companies could aspire, a test bed for new ideas that stood to upend how business is done — and, not incidentally, an opportunity to stand above the crowd in the world of commercial flooring.Climate Take Back is the noise the company wanted to make.
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The mission is that we will demonstrate that we can reverse the impact of climate change by bringing carbon home,” says COO Gould, who is expected to ascend to the company’s CEO role next year, with the current CEO, Hendrix, remaining chairman. “We want to be able to scale that to the point where it actually does reverse the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.”
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There’s a small but growing movement to use carbon dioxide molecules to build things — plastics and other materials, for example — thereby bringing it “home” to earth as a beneficial ingredient, as opposed to a climate-warming gas in the atmosphere.Interface’s commitment to “bring carbon home and reverse climate change” is a prime example how the company intends to move from “doing less bad” to “doing more good” — in this case, by not merely reducing the company’s contribution to climate change, but actually working to solve the climate crisis.
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tansfield believes Interface is in a similar position now. “We know now what the biggest issues of our generation — and frankly, our children's generation — are, and that's climate change, poverty and inequality on a planetary scale, on a species scale. We are bold and brave enough, as we did in '94, to stand up there and say, ‘If not us, who? And if not now, when?’”
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The notion is something Benyus has been talking about, and working on, for a while: to build human development that functions like the ecosystem it replaces. That means providing such ecosystem services to its surroundings as water storage and purification, carbon sequestration, nitrogen cycling, temperature cooling and wildlife habitat. And do so at the same levels as were once provided before humans came along.
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Specifically, Climate Take Back includes four key commitments:We will bring carbon home and reverse climate change.We will create supply chains that benefit all life.We will make factories that are like forests.We will transform dispersed materials into products and goodness.
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"Climate Take Back," as the new mission has been named, is the successor to Mission Zero, the name given to a vision articulated in 1997 that, for most outside the company, seemed audacious at the time: "To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits - by 2020 - and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence."
