The Carpet Maker's Promise

Abstract

In 1994, Ray Anderson, the founder of Interface, a manufacturer of carpet tiles based in Atlanta, was asked to speak to an internal task force about the company's environmental position. He did not have much to say. In looking for something, he read Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce , published the year before, and the book changed his view of his own company. He later described the experience, in a phrase that has followed the company ever since, as a "spear in the chest". Santa Anna's Ecstatic Economics tells the story in a few lines and adds Anderson's own verdict on what he had been running: "a plunderer of the earth." What followed is the most frequently cited case in the literature on regenerative business. Anderson committed Interface to a goal the company later named Mission Zero: to eliminate its negative impact on the environment by 2020. He went further in words than in any plan, saying that the company should become restorative, giving back more than it took.