October 15, 2002
Kamloops Daily News



At first I thought Ray Anderson was blowing hot air.  "I 
want to pioneer the company of the next industrial
revolution," said Anderson.  He's  C.E.O. of Interface
Corporation, the largest manufacturer of carpets and
flooring in the world.

Now I think that he is on to something good.  Maybe he
exaggerates a bit but it's not all hyperbole.  Anderson
travels the world telling anyone who will listen how he saw
the light.  "I'm a recovering plunderer," he recently told
CBC TV.  It's quite an admission from a guy who spent most
of his career as a self-confessed environmental vandal.

It's no small undertaking.  Interface Corporation has 7300
employees working in 26 flooring factories on 4 continents. 
Interface's most efficient plant is in Belleville, Ontario,
where they have reduced greenhouse emissions by 30 per cent
while increasing employment by 250 per cent since 1994. 
According to Anderson, even his employees are happier
knowing  that they are helping the planet to breath easier.

Anderson is crusading to turn industrial capitalism around. 
Since its beginning, the industrial revolution has been 
relentlessly linear - -  raw materials, energy, product,
packaging, marketing, waste.  Anderson's mantra is "cyclic
capitalism".  In short, companies should consume their own
waste.

Anderson does not lack ideas; leasing carpet to customers
and re-spinning them into new,  making fabrics from recycled
pop bottles, making carpets from hemp.  He's already making
office furniture fabric from pop bottles but is butting
heads with puritanical opposition and the "war on drugs"
gaggle in the U.S. Bush administration.

Anderson was recently in Canada preaching to the converted
at the David Suzuki Foundation.  The occasion was the
release of the Foundation's 50 page report called How
Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol Will Benefit Canada's
Competitiveness.

The report shows how savings to health care,  innovation in
new technologies, and energy savings could make Canada more
competitive, not less as critics of Kyoto claim.

It can be done.  The oil industry in Saskatchewan is
importing 95 million cubic feet of carbon dioxide a day from
North Dakota and injecting it into depleted oil fields.  
Yes, you read right.  They're importing the greenhouse gas
that everyone else is so worried about.  Instead of
releasing into the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide is used to
pressurize the oil field.  Like a shook-up pop can,  the
previously inaccessible oil is forced out of the field,
extending the life of one oil well near Weyburn by 25 years.

British Petroleum is ahead of its target of 10 per cent
reduction by using simple measures, like stopping leaks.  "And
we've met it at no net economic cost - because the savings
from reduced energy inputs and increased efficiency have
outweighed all the  expenditure involved," according to John
Browne, Chief Executive, BP.

Some industries have a habit of just saying no to goals that
would protect the environment.  They objected to the signing
of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, for example, which set goals
in the reduction of CFCs that destroy the ozone layer and
sulfur dioxide that causes acid rain.  The actual cost of
reducing sulfur dioxide was as little as one-seventh what
industry estimated.  The benefit of having acid-reduced
lakes is priceless.

The Kyoto accord requires only a modest reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions.   The European Union and Japan
have already done so.  California has voluntarily reduced
greenhouse gas emissions below what Canada would have to
under Kyoto.  Keep in mind that California is bigger than
Canada in population.

Canadians agree with Kyoto, not because they think that
Canada's contribution alone will have any great impact, but
because it's the right thing to do. The rate at which we are
consuming nonrenewable energy is unsustainable.

Canadians understand that if we are not part of the
solution,  then we are part of the problem.  The issue is
not just our ability to compete.  The issue is also whether we
want to languish in fossil-fuel technology just so we can
appease a U.S. administration that doesn't know, or care,
that we exist.

"A country's prosperity is created - -  not inherited from
it's natural resources,"  say Michael Porter of the Harvard
Business School.  Canada's prosperity depends on the
capacity of industry to innovate and upgrade.  To do
otherwise will relegate Canada as a backwater attachment of
the U.S. - - good only for our natural resources. 

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