Mr. What Ray Anderson This is Me

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1. 1. www.worldtribune.com

   www.worldtribune.com/worldtrib - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/27/2008   Last Visited: 2/27/2008

   When we found ourselves in New York in 1972, I went to the New York Times since Ray Anderson, its Moscow correspondent, had called the editors and advised them to receive me.

2. 2. www.religionhumanrights.com

   www.religionhumanrights.com/Et - [Cached]

   Published on: 5/22/2007   Last Visited: 1/15/2008

   In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was "about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be."
   
   Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company's carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company's worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.
   
   "He bet his entire company," said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in "green" buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment.
   ...
   And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability "doesn't cost, it pays" - in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.
   
   In fact, sustainability has been such a successful strategy that Interface established a consulting arm last year, to market its methods to other companies.
   
   As befits an evangelist, Mr. Anderson, a trim 72-year-old, has taken his message on the road, preaching the sermon of sustainability in at least 115 speeches around the world last year alone.
   ...
   But today, Dr. Chivian said, Mr. Anderson is "a model of creative thinking about sustainable business practices."
   ...
   When Mr. Anderson began his crusade, there were those who thought it was quixotic, and some in the company worried that he was a bit too intense about it. Others thought carpet tiles - squares of nylon pile glued ubiquitously underfoot in offices, classrooms, hospitals, airports and elsewhere - were an unlikely focus for an effort to change the way business does business.
   
   "Well, he won us all over," said Jo Ann Bachman, one of Mr. Anderson's assistants.
   ...
   And when people are finished with the carpet, "it goes into landfills where it lasts probably 20,000 years," Mr. Anderson said. "Abusive."
   
   So he challenged his employees to find ways to turn all of that around. And he forestalled objections from his own stockholders, he said, by making the elimination of waste the first target. "We saved money from Day 1," he said.
   
   He acknowledges that some of the advances the company has made so far are relatively obvious and easy, and that some of its claimed progress relies on steps, like carbon credits, that are far from ideal. For example, the company pays to plant trees that, in theory, take up enough carbon to compensate for the greenhouse gas generated by airplane flights on company business.
   
   "All you are really doing is inventorying the carbon for 200 years," Mr. Anderson said of the company's tree-planting efforts, which it subcontracts to a company in the carbon credit business. "It's better than nothing, but it's temporary."
   
   In the future, he said, progress will come "in a lot of little steps and a few very big ones."
   
   Developing recyclable nylon - "that's a big step," he said. (Whoever does it will get all his company's business, he has said.) Substituting "carbohydrates" - using corn dextrose instead of petroleum - would be even bigger.
   ...
   "If you begin with a company and say, ‘We are going to green this company by bolting on these green programs,' you are going to end up with costs up, not down," Mr. Anderson said. "We stepped back and said, Let's look at the whole system.' "
   
   The audiences for his speeches are changing, too, he said. In the beginning, he often found himself preaching to the choir, he said, but in the last five years, his audiences have more often been business groups.
   
   "I always make the business case for sustainability," he said. "It's so compelling. Our costs are down, not up. Our products are the best they have ever been. Our people are motivated by a shared higher purpose - esprit de corps to die for. And the goodwill in the marketplace - it's just been astonishing."
   
   Mr. Anderson, who has two grown daughters from a first marriage, commutes to his office in a Toyota Prius. He and his second wife, Pat, also have a home on 86 acres in the mountains near Highlands, N.C. It is off the grid, its landscaping designed to minimize environmental disruption.
   
   And after an argument with the landlord, Interface's office space here is now illuminated with low-energy, long-life light bulbs.
   
   Mr. Anderson is also proud to say that as a member of an advisory council at Georgia Tech, he persuaded the institution to modify its mission statement to proclaim the goal of "working for a sustainable society."
   
   But there is a lot that even business cannot accomplish on its own, he said.
   
   For example, he said, the tax code is "perverse," in that it puts heavy taxes on good things, like income and capital, and leaves a lot of bad things, like energy use, relatively unscathed. And economists typically underestimate the true cost of doing business because they exclude "externalities," like environmental damage from pollution.
   
   If it were up to him, he said, he would reduce income taxes and raise the gasoline tax (with subsidies for the poor). But he conceded that the Clinton administration, which he served as co-chairman of the Council on Sustainable Development, could not get an energy tax through Congress.
   
   "The country wasn't ready for it," Mr. Anderson said, adding that when the sustainability council had a cocktail party for members of Congress, only a handful of members showed up, some of them possibly drawn more by drinks than doctrine.
   
   But since then, he said, environmental groups have been spreading the message. He gives them credit for the success of Al Gore's global warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
   
   "Their work created a supersaturated solution," he said in the language of chemistry.
   ...
   Mr. Anderson's schedule is only getting more hectic. He is on track to easily surpass last year's speech-giving pace, he said, "and I don't have to send an invitation, they just keep finding me."
   
   But the effort is worth it, he said, not just for the opportunities he has to spread his message, but for its business-building effect. His favorite audiences are "rich in potential customers," he said, and among them the sustainability effort "has done more to lift the company's image than all the advertising we have ever done."
   
   All of which makes him smile when he looks back on that sales meeting of 1994.
   
   After the speech, he said, "I heard the whispers, ‘Has he gone round the bend?' " Mr. Anderson recalls proudly how he confessed at once that he had. "That's my job," he said. "To see what's around the bend."
   
   Ray Anderson Executive on a Mission Saving the Planet - New York Times

3. 3. World Tribune.com: Lev Navrozov: The truth about China is not for sale

   www.worldtribune.com/worldtrib - [Cached]

   Published on: 10/10/2005   Last Visited: 10/11/2005

   When we emigrated (what luck!) and arrived in New York in 1972, I was received by the New York Times Magazine editor because the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (Ray Anderson) had called him and spoken about me.