| CONFESSIONS OF A RADICAL INDUSTRIALIST Profits, People, Purpose—Doing Business by Respecting the Earth Ray C. Anderson with Robin White New York: St. Martin's Press, September 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-312-54349-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-312-54349-2 | 289pp. | SC/GSI | $? | |
There are glamorous industries, which inspire admiration in the public mind. I think it is safe to say that carpet manufacture is not among them.
Motivated by the great expansion of landfill volume, curbside recycling is now operating in some ten thousand American cities. But while a portion of the citizens diligently separate their glass, metal, and plastic, many others cannot be bothered to do so. Most recycling programs lose money, and public-service ads don't help much.
In 2004, Philadelphia's Ron Gonen2 had a better idea. Having dinner with a friend who told him New York City's recycling program lost money, Ron got an entrepreneurial gleam in his eye. He and his friend found that Philly spends $70 to haul every ton of trash to the dump, where useful materials are effectively gone forever. They asked themselves a new question.
"What if we could save the city money on every ton they didn't have to truck off to a landfill, and capture a piece of that for ourselves?" – Page 125 |
The solution was to reward consumers for the recycling they do. The way Ron and his friend accomplish that has the genius of simplicity: They embed an RFI chip in each bin, and this is registered to the household using the bin. When the truck arrives, it weighs the container and the weight of each batch of recyclables is credited to the bin's household. Today these RecycleBank™ points can be converted to money at over 1,200 businesses. Recycling rates in the areas served have gone from 20% to 90%. Over 300,000 households have signed up, and the company is working on a million more.
Yet Interface, the carpet company Ray Anderson founded, deserves to be. That is because he had an epiphany early in 1994, after reading Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce. It's a fascinating story. He tells it better than I can, so read it in the book. Suffice it for me to say that Ray suddenly understood the unsustainability of capitalism as it is currently practiced in most American corporations. He succinctly describes that unsustainable current form of capitalism in just three words: "Take—Make—Waste."
Ray Anderson's epiphany went bone-deep, and it led him and his company on a continuing quest for better performance in the ways that matter to Earth, to future generations of humans, and to the other life forms with which we share this finite planet. And what makes his story truly fascinating is that this epiphany did not turn him into an impractical tree-hugger type who drifted off into cloud-cuckoo land and forgot about keeping his company focused on the bottom line. To the contrary, his company —InterfaceGlobal — became twice as profitable as a direct result of his keeping it focused on reducing its consumption of virgin resources, cutting energy losses, and eliminating waste.
It's worth noting that Ray Anderson was 60 years of age when he had his epiphany. He was a hard-headed businessman who had earned a degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech and left another carpet manufacturer after rising to upper management there. He founded Interface because he felt he could do things better, and he proved it by making his new company successful in the traditional way. It was a leap of faith — but not as risky as the one he made when he decided, after reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, to steer Interface up the metaphorical slopes of Mount Sustainability.
It was no easy climb, and many were the nay-sayers assuring him he would never make any progress, let alone reach the top. But he showed the right kind of leadership: he set incremental goals and challenged his employees to tackle each one. And he found that they always came through. They might not have delivered the amount of savings he hoped for, and they might have had some false starts. But that is the nature of incremental progress. Even John Kennedy's Apollo Program, to which Anderson aptly compares his own endeavor, had its share of false starts and mistakes.
What counts is the final result. Here is a brief sketch of how Anderson's quest has affected the company's bottom line:1
This would be impressive enough if Anderson's reforms had involved only his own company. In fact, they affected the entire supply chain, from its suppliers to its customers, and even municipal services. When an Interface facility uses less water, the city has to pump less; if the water table in its aquifer happens to be dropping, that matters a great deal. Similarly, using less virgin nylon for carpet means less imported oil and less emission of carbon dioxide.
Moreover, because Interface proved by example that ecologically green business means more green in the form of profits, other companies — Wal-Mart among them — were empowered to take the plunge. Although Ray Anderson died in 2011, I think it is safe to say that his vision will spread until it has transformed the entire basis of industrial capitalism.
The book itself is a fairly easy read, part memoir, part sales pitch. Each chapter begins with a relevant quotation and many end with a string of bar graphs reflecting the progress Interface made in some area — water reduction, etc. Its principal defect is the lack of an index; that would be very useful given the number of participants (individuals and companies) mentioned in the text. A new edition titled Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist came out in March 2011; perhaps that has one. But I consider this book a must-read, with or without an index.
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