Ray Anderson
Ray Anderson
Founder and Chair
Interface
The story is now legend: the “spear in the chest” epiphany Ray Anderson experienced when he first read Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce, seeking inspiration for a speech to an Interface task force on the company’s environmental vision. Fifteen years and a sea change later, Interface, Inc., is more than half-way towards the vision of “Mission Zero,” the journey no one would have imagined for the company or the petroleum-intensive industry of carpet manufacturing which has been forever changed by Anderson’s vision. Mission Zero is the company’s promise to eliminate any negative impact it may have on the environment by the year 2020, through the redesign of processes and products, the pioneering of new technologies, and efforts to reduce or eliminate waste and harmful emissions while increasing the use of renewable materials and sources of energy. Ray chronicles that journey in a new “how” and “why” book on sustainability, Confessions Of A Radical Industrialist, which was published by St. Martin’s Press in September 2009.
An honors graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology, Ray learned the carpet trade through 14-plus years at various positions at Deering-Milliken and Callaway Mills, and in 1973, set about founding a company to produce the first free-lay carpet tiles in America. Today, he chairs the world’s largest producer of commercial floorcoverings. Interface has diversified and globalized its businesses, with sales in 110 countries and manufacturing facilities on four continents.
In 1997, Ray described his vision for his company, then nearly a quarter-century old, that remains true today: “If we’re successful, we’ll spend the rest of our days harvesting yester-year’s carpets and other petrochemically derived products, and recycling them into new materials; and converting sunlight into energy; with zero scrap going to the landfill and zero emissions into the ecosystem. And we’ll be doing well … very well … by doing good. That’s the vision.”
Anderson has been lauded by government, environmental, and business groups alike. In 2007, Ray was honored as a recipient of the Purpose Prize from Civic Ventures, a think tank and an incubator, generating ideas and inventing programs to help society achieve the greatest return on experience, and by Auburn University with its International Quality of Life Award. In 2010, he received the American Society for Interior Designers (ASID) Design for Humanity Award, significant because it came from an important Interface customer audience.
Ray is on the Advisory Boards of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment and the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper. Ray is former Board Chair for The Georgia Conservancy; and serves on the boards of the Ida Cason Callaway Foundation; Rocky Mountain Institute; the David Suzuki Foundation, Emory University Board of Ethics Advisory Council, the ASID Foundation, Worldwatch Institute, and the Arizona State University Global Institute of Sustainability Advisory Board. He holds ten honorary doctorates: Northland College (public service), LaGrange College (business), N.C. State University (humane letters), University of Southern Maine (humane letters), The University of the South (civil law), and Colby College (law), Kendall College (art), Emory University (science) Central College in Pella, Iowa, (humane letters), Chapman University (humane letters), and Clarkson University (science).
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