Interface has always been a leader in sustainability; it’s in the carpet company’s DNA. But the brand is now poised to turn an important corner by changing the way we think and speak about sustainability – from an ominous challenge to a feasible opportunity.
Interface wants us to think about what we read and hear from our news sources every week regarding global warming, climate change, and the state of our natural environments. Are they positive or negative?
Erin Meezan, vice president and chief sustainability officer at Interface. “We need an alternative narrative to climate change.”
The brand’s Climate Take Back initiative, introduced last year, moves far beyond the efforts of even the most ambitiously sustainable companies. In fact, the goals seem so lofty when you read them that it’s difficult to imagine how they’ll start accomplishing them.
But this year, Interface is beginning to show us just how they plan to do this – how they plan to change the current environmental crisis into an opportunity. At NeoCon in June, the company showed a prototype carpet tile, called Proof Positive, that takes plant based carbon and converts it into a durable material that holds the carbon in, preventing its release back into the atmosphere.
“We’ve been on this journey in having a restorative impact for the last 24 years, and we’ve been very successful in getting to zero carbon emissions,” says Ms. Meezan. “And we’re evolving our thinking about sustainability as we’re moving through our goals. Twenty years ago, the conversation was completely centered around “doing less harm,” but the evolving definition of being helpful to the environment needs to be, yes, to do less bad, but to also do more of what’s good.”
Proof Positive, named for its intent to prove that we can reverse climate change and improve our environment, uses new approaches to materials sourcing and manufacturing to make a product that has the potential to have a reversing impact on global warming.
“Every day plants pull carbon out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis but release it when they decompose,” the Proof Positive announcement notes. “Interface has taken specifically selected plant-derived carbon and converted it into a durable material that stores that carbon for at least a generation. The carbon is stored in the materials that make up the Proof Positive tile…After the tile is made, there is less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if it had not been made in the first place.
“Interface’s Proof Positive prototype tile has a negative carbon footprint, which the company achieved directly through design and manufacturing, without purchasing carbon offsets. Since 1996, Interface has reduced its cradle-to-gate product carbon emissions from an average of 20.0 kilograms of carbon per square meter to just over 7 kilograms per square meter in 2016. Though only a prototype at this stage, at less than -2 kilograms of carbon per square meter, Interface’s concept tile proves that it is possible to store carbon in products rather than emit more carbon into the atmosphere in the process of making those products. Should this approach to manufacturing products become mainstream over time, at volume and full scale, it could become a critical solution to reversing global warming over the long term.”
But do companies behind the curve need to start at square one and begin to achieve goals like getting to net zero carbon emissions and doing “less bad” first? Interface argues no.
“No, I really think you can leapfrog it,” says Ms. Meezan. “The challenge that most businesses face is that they are risk-averse; they think incrementally and make changes step-by-step that factor in a lot of other business goals. But you really can set goals that aim to begin making positive impacts right away.
“Climate Take Back actually requires all of us at Interface to believe that reversing climate change and creating a healthy, positive environment is possible. We’ve formed every part of our business around these goals.”
Interface’s goals revolve around four elements it believes must happen to execute Climate Take Back:
- Live Zero. Do business in ways that gives back whatever is taken from the Earth.
- Love Carbon. Stop seeing carbon as the enemy, and start using it as a resource.
- Let Nature Cool. Support our biosphere’s ability to regulate the climate
- Lead Industrial Re-Revolution. Transform industry into a force for climate progress.
“The challenge our CEO presented to the team was to show him how to create a product that proves our Climate Take Back goals can be done,” said Ms. Meezan. “With the Proof Positive carpet tile, the challenge we gave our innovation team was to find a way to have a positive impact on the business – not just in our products, but also in our operations and in how we’re taking care of our people.”
Of course the conversation usually begins with carbon, and what to do with it.
“We need to find a way to love carbon, to use it as a building block,” says Ms. Meezan. “We make stuff. So we need to find it [carbon] in the materials we use to make our products.
“Nature’s really good at doing this – pulling carbon from the atmosphere and using it. We can mimic that. We need to pursue technologies that can gather carbon and put it into raw materials. For example, putting CO2 into the foam used in shoes or into plastics. You can build it into raw materials, building materials, all kinds of things.”
This idea of looking at carbon differently means that companies will need to think holistically.
“We’re looking at the entire lifecycle of carpet tiles, all the energy that goes into that process – not just the actual product. We found that we were able to store more carbon in the tile than the entire lifecycle produces. So just imagine what our carbon budget would look like if all of our materials were built to hold it.”
Ms. Meezan says that Interface will probably never bring Proof Positive to market – a concept car of carpet tile sorts. But, this is where things begin.
“We’re learning about the raw materials. The purpose of the Proof Positive prototype was to prove it can be done, but also to give us the chance to learn about and test out all of those raw materials to see what works. And we know it works now, because we’ve done it.
“Our innovation team is working with a lot of new materials and processes, and we’re looking for things we can start to use now. Some of those materials can drop into our supply chain, and some of them are more experiential and conceptual. So, people can expect that a part of the next product we introduce could include one of those raw materials that Proof Positive had.”
Interface is also working on a pilot project called Factory as a Forest – another way they’re bringing Climate Take Back to life.
“The project’s goal is to build factories that have a positive impact on the space around them,” says Ms. Meezan. “Could our factories and campuses actually perform just like a natural, high-performing ecosystem? We think so, and we’re in the middle of figuring out how to manage that.”
They’ve put together a team of biologists who are figuring out how the natural ecosystems near their factories work. After getting that understanding in place, they plan to develop ways to make the factory buildings and campuses mimic the nature around them.
In this project, and hopefully future initiatives, the brand is taking a very Tesla-like approach to knowledge sharing.
“We’re not just doing something great and then ending the process there,” says Ms. Meezan. “We’re building that methodology up, and we plan to open source it so that others can do the same. We’re very excited to help other companies achieve their own environmental goals.”
So how do you view sustainability? If you view it as a debilitating challenge, why?
Next week, we’ll continue our coverage of Interface’s efforts to figure out what shapes our view of sustainability, and why a more positive vision of the future could help us actually accomplish one.