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A cooler production pattern through harnessing methane, cutting waste, recycling tiles

Corporate culture embracing sustainability

The urge to conserve is obvious at the Interface Corporation, which makes floor carpet tiles, from slogans painted on the factory floor (“One Planet/Zero Harm”), to prize parking spots reserved for car-poolers, to packing boxes so relentlessly recycled that they sit, wrinkled and battered, festooned with the remains of previously applied masking tape (bought from Germany, because the extra adhesive in American masking tape causes more wear and tear).

POWER SOURCE: An Interface plant in LaGrange, Ga., uses a city dump’s methane gas.
POWER SOURCE: An Interface plant in LaGrange, Ga., uses a city dump’s methane gas.

Less obvious is the way the company now looks at all of its processes, from the time designers think of a new pattern until customers return their worn-out carpet for recycling.

For example, when the company decided in 2000 to introduce a new line of carpet tiles, designers began by asking, “How would nature make a floor?” They thought of forests, where the ground is covered by pebbles, leaves, twigs, soil.

Cheaper power, less waste, cool business

This biomimicry produced Entropy, now one of Interface’s hottest patterns. Its randomness allows it to be applied any-which-way and tremendously reduces the amount of finished tiles that must be rejected as “off-quality.”

At the West Point plant which makes the nylon cloth facing for Entropy and for other patterns, an engineer has figured out that running the tufting machines with many relatively small creels of fiber, rather than fewer large creels, would greatly reduce waste — about $180,000 worth of first-quality nylon annually.

At the LaGrange plant which applies the rubbery backing for the tiles, company engineers have worked with city engineers to find out how much methane, a greenhouse gas, was coming out of the municipal dump. The answer, it turned out, was enough to power the Interface plant for probably 40 years. So the company agreed to adapt its boilers and buy the gas, if the city would pipe it in.

The upshot was abundant power, cheaper than the natural gas it replaced; a multimillion-dollar revenue stream for the city of LaGrange; longer life for its landfill, whose volume decreases as methane is drawn off; and a more pleasant environment for the dump’s neighbors.

And there are also climate benefits, as the LaGrange plant is now diverting methane away from the atmosphere, and methane is a much more powerful heat-trapper than carbon dioxide. The greenhouse gas reductions from capturing and using waste methane for energy are enough to offset the emissions from all other corporate activities in North America.

Continuous green innovation

Interface would eventually like to be able to recycle the nylon in used carpet tiles for new carpet. In recent years the company has been able to use worn tiles in making backing for new carpet. It markets the results as “Cool Carpet” which has strong customer appeal. Last year, this diverted 16.8 million pounds of waste tile from landfill.

The company is also experimenting with small sheets of plastic that could be used to attach tiles to one another and, it is hoped, eliminate the need for glue and the volatile organic compounds that come with it.

It is acknowledged that the easiest problems are solved quickest and that finding new ways to improve environmental performance is becoming harder. It helps that everyone in the company is eligible for an annual bonus, and the bonus depends on meeting both production and sustainability goals. “Sometimes it’s difficult to keep it energized”, said a senior manager of the company, “But that’s where I think the culture of the company embracing the concept has built momentum.”

[Adapted from articles in the New York Times, May 22, 2007]