Offices, conference rooms, and corridors are tiled with the carpet manufactured by Interface Flooring Systems. The tiles can be replaced when and where needed, thus minimizing waste. A water-based, zero volatile organic compound adhesive is used to install the carpet tiles.
Interface chairman and CEO Ray Anderson, former Co-chair of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, is passionate about Interface’s quest for sustainability:
“The built environment is a very big user of resources throughout the western world in particular. Upwards of 40%, I believe, of all energy and materials go one way or another into the built environment. So the environmental footprint of our buildings is a crucially important factor in our quest for sustainability.”
“Reducing that footprint in an environmentally sensitive way can make a huge contribution to the resource efficiency that’s needed for the next industrial revolution.”
“What that means to me and to my company in particular – which is where my energy and efforts are focussed – is to move on a number of fronts. For example:
“That’s the industrial system of the next industrial revolution.”
- from extractive raw materials to renewable raw materials, and
- from the linear processes of the first industrial revolution – the take make waste processes that we’ve all grown up with and become so familiar with – to the cyclical processes that emulate nature. Using our natural materials in a sort of dust-to-dust cycle, but also technical materials in the technical cycle;
- and then driving those processes with renewable energy rather than fossil-fuel derived energy; and
- reengineering our processes to be benign toward nature rather than being abusive, to being less wasteful the way, again, emulating nature where there is no waste in nature … you know one organism’s waste is another’s food.
Environmental products and services: Sources and contributors
An asterisk indicates suppliers who contributed products or services.
- * Interface Flooring Systems
- Carpet tile
- P.O. Box 1503, LaGrange, GA 30241 (770/420-6681)
