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:

• 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.

"That's the industrial system of the next industrial revolution."

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)