Wiping slate clean helps change fate of planet

An American businessman by the name of Ray Anderson died last August. You have probably never heard of him, and are wondering what this has got to do with conservation.

It is an interesting story. Back in 1973 Anderson attended a conference and came across the concept of carpet tiles. It took his breath away. In a flash he realised their potential, and by 1990 he was the biggest producer in the world, with many different styles and uses.

Unfortunately, they were almost entirely made of petroleum in one form or another, and some pretty bad stuff was used in the dyes and glue. More than 200 smokestacks blackened the sky to produce them.

In 1994, at age 60, under pressure from customers to produce some sort of environmental strategy, he assembled a small taskforce. Someone gave him a book, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce. In it is a chapter called The Death of Birth, about the extinction of species. Suddenly tears were running down his cheeks. In another flash he realised he was to blame for making the world worse. Now he had to make it better.

He decided his company, Interface, would leave no imprint on the world. By 2020 it would take nothing from the earth that could not be easily replenished. It would produce no greenhouse gases and no waste. This meant using renewables instead of fossil fuel, making carpet tiles out of carbohydrate polymers instead of petroleum, and recycling old carpet sludge into backing for tiles.

By 2007 he reckoned they were about halfway there. Greenhouse gas emissions were down 92 per cent, water usage down 75 per cent, 74,000 tons of old carpet had been rescued from landfills and 25 per cent of the company's new material came from post-consumer recycling. He was saving $400 million a year, which easily paid for ongoing research into new techniques. Most satisfying of all, sales had increased by two-thirds and profits had doubled.

He never dreamed of giving up carpet tiles, and was responsible for Cool Carpet, with no contribution to global warming, and his favourite, Entropy, based on a forest floor, no two tiles alike, and able to be installed and replaced randomly.

The lesson here? Anyone can help conservation. No project is too big or too small to be considered, and it is never too late to start. Best of all, conservation measures almost always pay for themselves.

Most of this material came from The Economist, a much-admired and respected business journal which has long been warning about climate change and emphasising the financial advantages of conservation in every form. Isn't it about time we sat up and took notice, or risk being left behind?

Ian Sutherland is a retired pathologist with a lifelong interest in natural history and concern for the environment.