Global Climate Change and Sustainable Business

Ray Anderson is the CEO of Interface Corporation, a carpet tile manufacturing company with $1.1 billion in annual sales and 38 % of the global market for carpet tiles (Dean 2007). In 1994, Anderson vowed to change Interface into a sustainable business. Formerly, Interface was a company that merely complied with environmental regulations and through that compliance, put five billion tons of carpeting in landfills (DesJardins 2007: 111). Anderson sees Interface as a company that was abusive to the environment: it relied on petroleum both as energy to make carpet and as material out of which to create synthetic carpet; it produced large amounts of CO2 emissions in the process; it used large amounts of water for dyeing carpet and created wastes in its production operations, as well as contributed to landfills (Dean 2007). Anderson vowed to transform Interface into a company that would take nothing out of the earth that 1 cannot be recycled and regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere (Dean 2007)