Leasing Carpet

In 1994, Paul Hawken wrote a book called, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, which argues that industry is destroying our planet. Ray Anderson (pictured), the CEO of a large international resource-intensive carpet company called Interface, read Hawken's book in 1994 and had an epiphany. Anderson realized that he had failed to take the earth's finite natural capital into account when balancing the books at Interface. He immediatly created clean technology goals for Interface and began studying how Interface might change its business model from products to services. In a service model, customers would rent their carpet.

The advantages are many.

• Interface installs, cleans, maintains the carpet


• Worn out carpet tiles are retrieved and replaced by Interface in a rolling, continuous facelift


• The worn tiles are disassembled and face fiber and backing, which are re-used or recycled.


• Carpet is usually viewed as having a lifespan of about ten years. In this new model, carpet is renewed rather that dumped in a landfill.


• Carpet is no longer a capital expense.
  
• In the future, the carpet tiles will be made from durable, non-toxic, non-petroleum-based materials
  
• Carpet tiles are designed to be disassembled and re-used.

Ray Anderson documents this radical shift in his book, Mid-Course Correction. In addition to presenting his plans for Interface, Ray discusses a number of new ways of thinking about sustainability. One of my favorites is Ray's analysis of, throwing away trash. Ray argues convincingly that there is no such think as "away". In a finite, sustainable ecosystem, there is no such place to throw anything. Its on page 114.