Ray Andersen at Interface Carpets

Ray Andersen at Interface Carpets is probably the poster boy for everything that corporate sustainability has to offer – both good and bad. On the plus side Interface came up with a novel concept – instead of selling carpets, which is a physical product, it would lease floor covering, which is a service and has no adverse impacts on the environment. In this way it would provide more value to its customers and at the same time reduce its impact on the environment, a win-win situation. But despite all the gains for sustainability, when push comes to shove, poor old Ray has to admit that his company still does more damage to the environment than good (see article in reading pack).

During our first debate we questioned whether an economy could grow while at the same time being environmentally friendly. A comment by one of the teams highlighted the notion that in the new economy we really don’t depend on physical resources we depend on intangibles like knowledge and information.

But is this really true? After all, programmers have to eat, don’t they? And if one billion IT programmers in India start developing a taste for McDonald’s hamburgers doesn’t that mean on aggregate that the world economy will be consuming more beef (and by definition a whole lot more water, land, fossil fuels, chemicals and healthcare)? The same could be said about the taste for driving and airline travel in China.

The first question that needs to be asked and answered is whether there is a link between our current economic growth and physical resource consumption. To help answer this think of extraction industries such as agriculture, chemicals, pulp & paper and mining, then look around your house, in your garbage and in your garage. You will probably find a fair bit of wood, plastic metal and food products.

Another example of the resource link to our economy was an article about Caterpillar Inc. (one of the largest makers of earth moving equipment globally) which I came across some months ago. The company cannot keep up with orders for its mining vehicles because demand for virgin ferrous metal around the globe is rising at an unprecedented pace. What’s even more telling is that there is a huge bottleneck in capacity for the tires that operate these things. This of course means they will certainly start breaking ground on new tire plants – an industry that had stagnant capacity until recently. This is truly ironic if you consider that the tire on a mining vehicle would fill up a classroom and cost about $40,000 – that’s a lot of rubber and petrochemicals.

In conclusion – ‘studies show’ and the anecdotal evidence abounds – rising GDPs tend to have a very direct correlation with physical consumption.

So what’s the solution?

Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Ray Anderson and Dan Jones all have similar ideas about this (see the articles about Natural Capitalism and Ray Anderson in the reading pack) and companies such as DuPont, Interface and Otis Elevator are beginning to adapt these ideas and concepts at a furious rate. To date, however, the impact of implementing these ideas has been minimal as such innovations are in their infancy.

In the future what concepts will enable us to decouple economic growth from physical consumption? What are the constraints we face in doing so? Are they technological? Cultural? Organizational? Political? Consider some concrete examples like computers and electronics, which tend to be piling up, and the paper industry where paper recycling is very limited. I look forward to your comments . . .