Greening Big Business: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist
Ray Anderson is known as ‘the greenest chief executive in America’ – but he wasn’t always that way. The founder and CEO of Interface Inc., a carpet tile company, found himself faced with giving a speech about his company’s approach to the environment in 1994 and it really made him think.
He told The New York Times, “I was running a company that was plundering the earth. I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail! It was a spear in the chest.’”
Anderson is a prime example of how going green can benefit companies financially. Since setting out to make Interface a more sustainable operation in 1995, the company has saved an amazing $336 million. At the same time, according to Haily Zaki of Inhabitat.com, Interface was able to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 82%, fossil fuel consumption by 60%, waste by 66% and water by 75%.
Now, Anderson is sharing his advice and experience with the world in a book called Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose – Doing Business by Respecting the Earth.
The book gives other companies that would like to see similar success in turning sustainability into a successful business strategy a practical roadmap to the process.
“I think that if I had any advice to give, it would be to make sure your product meets every conventional test of the market and then add the environmentally responsible frosting on the cake,” Anderson told GreenLivingIdeas.com in an October 2009 interview about the book.
“Green for the sake of green may not cut it. In fact, there’s another way to think about that: The brownest product there is is the greenest product that doesn’t work. Not only is it not working, but also it’s giving green a bad name.”
Check it out at Amazon.com.
Link Open Forum + Green Living Ideas + Amazon
Related posts:
- Seven Fun and Creative Eco-Friendly Business Cards
- New Eco-Friendly Sneaker the New Balance 70
- ReBurbia: Designers Take on Greening the American Suburb
- Bottom of the Barrel: Newsweek’s Least Green Companies
- Glass Beach: Radical Example of Natural Recycling
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under Consciousness, Green Living, Health, Science, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
