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Industrialist who embraced green values passes away

Industrialist who embraced green values passes away

TRIBUTES have been paid to the American industrialist Ray Anderson who has passed away aged 77.

Mr. Anderson will be remembered for embracing green values for his multinational company, Interface, which is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of carpet tiles.

He began the process, which was eventually to see him being dubbed “America’s greenest Chief Executive Officer”, in the early 1990s when he read The Ecology of Commerce by the environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, which exposed the massive waste in industry.

Mr. Anderson was inspired to begin finding ways of making his business become greener and more environmentally friendly.  His “Mission Zero” project aims to deliver the goal of zero impact on the environment by his company by 2020.

The project has already delivered impressive results. In 2009 Interface, which employs 5,000 people worldwide, revealed it had already reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 44%, water usage by 75% and energy usage by 43%.

To achieve these figures Mr. Anderson had introduced a range of initiatives which included using water and rail methods for distribution, car pooling for staff and fair trade for suppliers — all now widely embraced by companies today but were then seen as trail-blazing.

His success led Mr. Anderson to become a moving force within the industrial world in encouraging other companies to become greener.

He chronicled his environmental efforts in two books, Mid-Course Correction (1998) and Confessions of a Radical Industrialist (2009), which became essential reading in the boardrooms of many top companies.

To view an interview with Ray Anderson click here.

 

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