The scale of the climate crisis requires that companies change the way they operate. Yes, it would be easier to simply purchase carbon offsets and continue to do business as usual. But if we are going to succeed in reversing climate change, companies must take the next step and transform their processes from cradle to gate (or even grave if they can!) So, how does a business get started on the path to sustainability?
Erin Meezan is the Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Interface, Inc., a pioneering modular flooring company with a deep commitment to sustainability. Interface is also the recipient of a 2020 UN Global Climate Action Award and the subject of the new documentary Beyond Zero. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Erin joins Ross to explain what inspired Interface’s commitment to the environment and how the team approached the sustainability conversation with its investors early on.
Erin discusses the company’s recent launch of carbon-negative carpet tiles, walking us through the value associated with doing business more sustainably and the necessity of conducting a full life cycle assessment of a given product. Listen in to understand how Interface is influencing other businesses to make fundamental change and learn how YOUR company might take its first steps to sustainability!
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Resources
Interface’s Climate Take Back Mission
The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken
CarbonCure on Reversing Climate Change S2EP16
2020 UN Global Climate Action Awards
Interface’s Lessons Learned Report
Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose—Doing Business by Respecting the Earth by Ray C. Anderson with Robin White
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Erin Misen, VP and Chief Sustainability Officer at Interface Inc. Hi Erin. Hi Ross. It is so good to have you here and I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened years ago because we’ve been following Interface for so long because you’re seemingly always doing interesting things over there. So thanks for being here.
Erin Meezan: I’m super excited. Thanks for having me. I’m a huge fan of Nori. I mean, I was at the first Reversa Palooza. I’m a fan of the podcast. And I love the fact that we both have missions that are about reversing global warming and that we say it publicly.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thanks. Yeah. Oh, Reversa Palooza. Those heady days. When even was that? The early days. Yeah, about a year and a half, two years ago. When was that? I think it was April of 2018 or something like that. Thanks for taking a risk on coming out for some goofy little startup and talking about carbon removal.
Erin Meezan: Well, it was so awesome because at the time, I mean, we had launched Climate Take Back, our mission to reverse global warming. And it was such an exciting time at Interface. It was causing us to look at new raw materials and talk to people like Klaus Lackner and read as much as we could possibly find on carbon removal because we had come to the conclusion that As a company that sets a really ambitious mission on carbon, it wasn’t just about getting to zero anymore. We had to get our arms around what would carbon removal look like in a company.
And Nori and the group of people that were following you and helping to sort of found Nori, it was like one of the few communities and small groups of people in the U.S. who was actually having these conversations on carbon removal. So we like were kind of drawn to you guys.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. We reciprocate as well. If you’re listening and you’re not familiar with Interface, I’ll leave it to you to introduce all of what you do, Aaron, and what Interface produces. But I think if you are listening and you don’t know about Interface, it’s probably because many of their products are focused towards people who are building buildings and designers. It’s a little less consumer-facing. But within the sustainability and regenerative economy space, Interface is a giant and stands very tall indeed. So maybe we should start then at the beginning, Aaron, and what exactly is Interface?
Erin Meezan: Sure. Four really important things to know about Interface. We are a U.S.-based company in Atlanta, Georgia. So we’re U.S.-based in Atlanta. We are just over a billion dollars. We make flooring products, carpet tile, resilient flooring like luxury vinyl tile or LVT and rubber. And we are a company who’s deeply committed to sustainability and have been since about 1994. What happened in 1994? So the company was about 25 years old at the time. And in 1994, we kind of had a fundamental shift in the business.
Our founder, Ray Anderson, who started the business in the early 70s, got asked a question by a customer that he couldn’t answer. And the question was coming from a project in California, one of the first green building projects. And it was, what is your company doing for the environment? And Interface did not have an answer. And they were not doing much for the environment. And the products reflected that. And we lost the job. And it got back to Ray and he said, we have to find a way to answer this question in the future.
He was not concerned about the environment, but he was concerned about our customers caring about something that we didn’t care about. So he started a task force, you know, what most companies do when they try to get an answer. They put a bunch of people on it. And that group of people turned around and said to him, well, as the founder of the company, you know, what’s your environmental vision? And he quickly realized he didn’t have an environmental vision we’d never thought about. The damage that the company or the products were doing.
And in the course of getting ready to deliver the speech to this task force, Ray read a book by Paul Hawken called The Ecology of Commerce, and he had what he calls an epiphany, a fundamental change in mindset about Business and the environment. And starting in 1994, that August, he committed that our business would first strive for zero impact, then go towards being a restorative company. And we’ve been on that pathway ever since.
Ross Kenyon: That strikes me as being pretty early, especially for talking about Regeneration rather than merely doing less bad, but actively doing good environmentally. Seems like this may or may not be true, but I suspect it is. That interface has been always pushing me like sustainability isn’t actually good enough. We need to go beyond this. And also there’s no excuses because textiles and carpets are not, in my limited understanding, the cleanest of industries to begin with. So you’ve been driving this along as a company seemingly since then.
Erin Meezan: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was, I think the idea of zero footprint 25 years ago was revolutionary, but to say we’re going to do zero footprint and then ultimately want to be restorative, that really was revolutionary. And it came from a couple interesting places. I mean, once Rey had the Mindset shift that we had to move in that direction. You know, there were no NGOs, resources, case studies, and he didn’t know where to go. And he quickly realized, I need to surround myself with some pioneering people who can help us even imagine life.
How we move towards being restorative. So he actually reached out to Paul Hawken. He wrote him a letter and said, hey, you know, this is who I am. I have a billion dollar carpet business. I need your help. And Paul Hawken was wondering. One of the first people who came on as an advisor to Interface to really build a business pathway to get to restorative. And the model that we looked at was nature. We actually ask ourselves if nature designed a business or What would it look like and how would it function?
And we know it would be, you know, something that would have positive impacts. And we took direct lessons from nature. So nature doesn’t waste anything. We set zero waste goals in the early 90s. Nature runs on sunlight. We set renewable energy goals. You know, nature cycles nutrients in a loop. We set recycling targets. And it really became kind of our mentor goal. For what good looks like. What’s it like to make a change like that as a publicly traded company?
Was it publicly traded in 1994 interface? Yes. So we started in the 70s. We went public like 83 or 84. For anyone who’s listening, our ticker symbol is Tile, T-I-L-E. Certainly, our investors weren’t asking about it in the 90s. I think the main reaction from the investors set at the time was concern that this would cost money. One of the early myths of doing business more sustainably is that it’s going to be a drag on profitability because it’s going to cost more. And Interface smartly focused on something very tangible early in the sustainability journey that I think later helped with that investor skepticism, and that was that we focused on waste.
As a manufacturer, someone who takes in materials from other suppliers and makes them into carpet tiles, rubber, resilient floorboards, We needed to focus on the biggest, most unsustainable part of our operation first, and that was what we could control in our factories, and that was what we were wasting. By trimming products, by maybe less efficient processing, and by focusing on waste first, we both reduced the footprint of But also we had a number to share with Wall Street about what we had saved in terms of not wasting. And I think that was a really great metric to start to push back against the narrative of sustainability is bad for business.
It’s going to cost more. You know, we used to say this is every year how much we’ve avoided waste costs. And that eventually became in the hundreds of millions of dollars before we stopped tracking it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Waste is a great place to start for that reason. It translates seemingly effortlessly into money saved for the company and the value to the environment and landfill avoidance is clear. What about something else like the other efforts that Interface is doing, which maybe we should detail here, how do those impact the value of the company or how it’s perceived? And are any of these things purely costs or are you able to derive value from all of these decisions as well?
Erin Meezan: I think there’s absolutely several levels of value associated with doing business more sustainably. So when you think about something like the most recent announcement we had last week, which is that we’ve launched the first carbon negative carpet tile. What value do stakeholders get out of that? And who really benefits? Well, I mean, the first is obviously if you’re an employee at Interface and you see that we’ve Really adopted an aggressive sustainability mission to the point where it’s manifesting itself in all of the products that we’re making.
There might be a connection alignment to your values there. So that might provide value to our employees in the sense that they feel like they’re able to work at a place where there’s a connection to a higher purpose. I think it provides value to our customers and Who increasingly, whether they’re businesses or universities, they’ve made commitments to reduce their carbon footprint and their carbon impact. And, you know, one way a lot of businesses can do that is by managing what they buy. It’s pretty simple. Just buy a better, lower carbon version of what you’re buying now.
So I think there’s value that goes there. When we produce a carbon negative product... One that is actually storing more CO2 than it emits through the cradle to gate raw materials to manufacturing stage. We’re keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, which has a value for the planet. For me, for the next generation of my family, for everyone who’s on the planet right now. So there’s an environmental value. And I think the other value is Carbon negative products give interface a competitive advantage. We are the only ones offering them now.
So if you are a customer who cares about that, we have a differentiated place in the market, which should translate to growth in a carpet tile sales area, which if you’re an investor sounds really great because interface has a differentiated place. Product that is appealing to what our customers care about. So I think there’s value at all levels if we’re just willing to look at it.
Ross Kenyon: I think so too. And I know that there have been quite public employee mutinies at companies that were not doing enough and their employees just didn’t want to work someplace that was contributing to net harm of the planet and competition for talent. Some of these big companies is so intense that can be quite a big lever to pull among the other reasons that you specify here. Well, let’s talk about these products specifically because I did sort of bury the lead a tiny bit, which is that you just announced that there’s a carbon negative carpet tile.
What exactly is a carpet tile? First of all, I know what carpet is. What is the tile component? And then what are these various lines?
Erin Meezan: Oh, great. We get to finally talk about carpet tile. Well, carpet tile is actually what Interface created. So the interesting story around it is before Ray Anderson created Interface, he was in the carpet industry and the industry that makes what we would call in our industry broad loom carpet or the carpet most of us grew up with, the rolls of carpet. And he saw modular carpet or carpet tile. And that basically is squares of carpet. That, you know, join together to create a specific design or installation.
So, you know, my parents would say you work for a company that makes rolled carpet and then cuts it into squares. And so, you know, if you’re not in the industry, it’s basically squares of carpet. That’s carpet tile. But Ray Anderson saw it and was so enamored of it that he decided to build a business around it. And in the early 70s, it was like kind of the purge. So, this idea of having all of the benefits of like different ways to design, different ways to kind of experience modularity was what really created a successful first 10-year run for the company.
Architects and designers really liked it. It had this incredible flexibility and if you’ve ever kind of seen or interacted with our residential brand Floor, F-L-O-R, you know that it’s super cool in a house too. Because how many times do you have like a rogue guest who spills something on your carpet or in our instance, a dog incident, you can just pick up that piece and Wash it, dry it, and put it back. Or if it’s not salvageable, you can replace it with another square without having to replace the entire rug or the entire room.
So from a design perspective, but just an everyday life perspective, carpet tile is like a game changer. I have it in almost every room of my house. So that’s kind of what the product is. And how it’s made and what kind of it consists of, imagine it as being a product that has a couple different layers. The yarn or the nylon, which is the fluffy, beautiful design on the top, then there’s usually a couple layers underneath that and then there’s a backing. So in the early 90s, when we thought about how will we make these products more sustainable, we realized we have to drive sustainability into all of those different layers.
And when you’re figuring out how to... Measure it and make it more sustainable. One of the first things that you do is a carbon footprint, which I’m sure most of your listeners know, but it’s assessing all the raw materials, the manufacturing, the energy and everything that goes into making that carpet tile and the carbon implication of that. And so what we’ve been able to do with the Sequest backings and the products that we’ve just launched over the last week is by measuring the carbon footprint from raw material extraction and processing all the way through to our making the products and their products.
And they’re getting to our customers. That cradle to gate phase is carbon negative because we’ve used new biomaterials, more recycled content and some low energy, low carbon footprint manufacturing processes to create the products so that they actually are carbon negative in that cradle to gate stage.
Ross Kenyon: We love talking about LCAs because they’re so wonderfully weird and seemingly impossible if you look at closely enough to account for everything. So maybe a nice refresher would be good for the audience of what counts in doing a lifecycle assessment for the carbon embodied in your products. What counts and what doesn’t?
Erin Meezan: Yeah. So, I mean, a life cycle perspective, if you’re not, you know, a practitioner and not deep in the industry, basically to me means looking at all the phases that go into making something, whether it’s a carpeting. What are the impacts of that extraction? What are the impacts of that extraction? So a lifecycle assessment just means looking all the way through there. And for companies who want to be focused on sustainability... It’s a game changer and a must because most companies who make something, just the company part of that is a really small part of the footprint of something.
You know, like more than 80% of the carbon footprint of a carpet tile, for example, happens in the raw material extraction before it even gets to our door. And the small amount of carbon associated with what we do to take those raw materials and make them into a carpet tile... You know, is tiny in comparison. So if you’re a company who’s only focusing on your doors, your operations, and you’re not using a lifecycle view, you’re missing like 80% of the impact. And, you know, for different companies, it’s different.
But a generalization is if you make something, there’s an impact associated with the materials that you’re making that something with that you can’t ignore.
Ross Kenyon: So how does one even make a carbon negative carpet tile then? It seems almost out of your hands. I imagine much of this is being done by the materials that you’re procuring to actually manufacture into carpet tiles.
Erin Meezan: Yes. And so part of it is you work with your existing supply chain to send them the right signals, measure together, and actually drive the creation of more sustainable raw materials, which is what we’ve done with our nylon supplier, Aquafil, 15 years ago. And even when we started on our journey 20 years ago, one of the first things we did was convene our suppliers for a summit and say Interface has set this crazy goal of zero environmental impact and then we’re going to be restorative. And in order to get there, we’re going to start measuring the impact of our company and eventually the impact of our products.
We’re going to use lifecycle assessment. And that tells us that you suppliers of ours are a big part of the challenge. And we need you to innovate. And so Throughout the 15-20 year journey, we’ve pulled a bunch of different levers with suppliers. Some of it has been using our purchasing power. We challenged our nylon suppliers to say, look, we have about three of you right now, and each of you have about a third of our business. Whoever can give us a recycled nylon first can enjoy a much broader scope of our business.
We’ll buy more from you if you give us better stuff, lower impact stuff. So sometimes we’ve used our purchasing power. Sometimes we’ve just educated suppliers and sort of said, here’s the impact that you’re having right now. We need a lower impact and identified projects with them together. Sometimes we brought our technical teams together to kind of do peer-to-peer sharing. There’s a lot of different strategies you can use. You can’t just demand it and not engage. You have to be really mindful of how you can do that.
And so a lot of our creating carbon negative products is just getting better raw materials. So better means lower carbon footprint. And for us, that means recycled materials instead of virgin materials because they do have a lower impact. Another way, though, is as you’ve said, it’s different materials. It’s looking at Recycled nylon versus potentially bio or different materials we could use in our backing that might not be petro-derived but might be bio. So in the Sequest backings and the Embodied Beauty products that we launched last week...
You know, those are a combination of more recycled content, new bio content, and then finding more lower impact ways to combine all those materials so that the end result when you measure the carbon footprint is actually storing more carbon. These biomaterials, what are they? So the exact kind of biomaterial that we’re using is proprietary, but any biomaterial is plant-based. And if you look at what plants can do to absorb carbon and lock it in, we’re both inspired by that on kind of the broad level, but then using that You know, nature’s ability to store carbon to put more biomaterials that store carbon into the product so that if we get the calculus right and have a low enough manufacturing impact and a high enough recycled content paired with the carbon that’s in those biomaterials, that’s how we can get ourselves to the place where we’re actually storing more carbon throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the relationship in your thinking between a company decarbonizing as Interface has done versus purchasing offsets or thinking about carbon removals as a new asset class? How do you make sense of these various approaches and what’s the relationship between them?
Erin Meezan: Yeah, I think any company nowadays has to be getting their mind around the reality that we can’t reduce our way to reversing So the mindset that I think many businesses and institutions and frankly governments have had over the last decade is we can just reduce our way out of the problem is so fundamentally flawed. They’ve got to open up the perspective and sort of say – A legitimate company strategy, country strategy, global strategy actually has to be decarbonizing certainly as quickly as possible. And we all need to be focused on that.
And we all need to up our ambition on how quickly to decarbonize. But that has to be paired with some sort of strategy to then think about carbon removal. And we say to kind of everyone who will listen, employees, investors, customers, investors, It’s kind of three things. It’s deep decarbonization. It’s getting the extra carbon that’s up there out of the atmosphere through removal. And it’s doing those two things while also contributing to protecting the sinks we have and enhancing the carbon sinks on the planet.
So if that’s what science tells us has to happen... Every strategy, whether it’s a government strategy, a corporate strategy on climate, to me, has to have those elements. And so I think reduction and removal happen together within a strategy. But for many companies now, none of them are doing anything related to carbon removal. They don’t really have their minds around it. They don’t really understand what it’s going to look like. And maybe when they first get down that path, Ross, offsets will be the, much like offsets were for reductions, for many companies, it might be the first entry point.
And so maybe they will be coming to Nori as their first needing to be educated on removal and how that fits into a company strategy. So maybe they start with removal credits before they can really ramp up their own efforts around removal. Right? Right.
Ross Kenyon: It’s interesting to think about and I wonder how these discussions do happen at big companies because there’s something that’s so clean about just buying either offsets or carbon removals relative to fundamentally changing your company such that it embodies biomimicry as a design philosophy. That’s really hard. That takes potentially decades of thought of trying to work with suppliers, Very complicated versus just going onto a website and purchasing some sort of carbon asset. So for a company that might be looking at something that were a bit simpler, how might you nudge them towards the interface way of doing business?
Erin Meezan: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s fair. And I think we have to all agree that there is a fundamental legitimacy associated with offsets, which is there are lots of times when it makes sense... In the abstract now, I’m not talking about specific carbon offsets or that versus what Nori creates, but the idea that there are times when we would invest in something to reduce or balance an emission that we could do at a better cost somewhere else versus the company taking that on. I think there’s some fundamental legitimacy, but here’s what I think is flawed about Let’s just say you and I start a company and together we’re responsible for 30 million tonnes of carbon going into the atmosphere on an annual basis.
What’s wrong with us just buying 30 million tonnes of carbon I think what we know is that while the abstract of a carbon offset in the abstract sounds great, in practice, not all offsets are created equal. So that’s one thing. I think the second thing is that while just buying offsets is based on the premise that there is a global carbon budget and we have to kind of align our efforts to that, what it misses is that when most companies think about that calculation, they’re not using a science-based target approach to that.
They’re sort of shooting incredibly low by saying just as a result of what we do in our business, it’s 30 million tonnes. So they’re not looking at the historic carbon that they put into the atmosphere over the last 30 years of being in business. They’re not thinking that way. And they need to. It’s not just a whatever you’re doing on an annual basis. It’s what you’ve contributed to this problem over the history of you being a business. So you don’t just get to say on an annual basis, oh, we’re net net.
You know, I think the third thing is that We have to fundamentally change how business and our economies function to grapple with the scale of what we’re trying to solve in terms of reversing global warming. It’s not as simple as just buying offsets. You do have to be mindful of how you change your supply chain. You do have to be mindful of the raw materials that you’re using. You can’t just kind of continue to do business as usual and then buy offsets to balance it. We fundamentally need to Think about reimagining how our businesses work if we’re going to get close to actually solving this.
Ross Kenyon: Do you see that attitude being adopted by many others, either in the building trades and related fields or just business in general? I imagine this is becoming a lot more common as a philosophy these days.
Erin Meezan: Yeah, I mean, I’m optimistic about the amount, for example, of companies that have adopted a science-based target. Because I think that is imperfect, but what it shows is a shift from this idea that I’m just setting a completely arbitrary target in a vacuum based on my company’s annual emissions. And I’m much more aligning with a view that is around what does science tell us we need to Deliver to keep the planetary carbon at a level that will create an atmosphere that’s fit for life, right? So I think it’s optimistic to see companies starting to realize I’ve got to be much more aligned with what science says that we need to do and raise our level of ambition and the way it manifests itself as a science-based target.
So that’s optimistic for sure. But I’m not wildly optimistic about what I see coming out of the corporate sector in terms of companies actually doing it. This year has been really interesting because several large companies have made commitments. And that’s fantastic, whether it’s Microsoft or Apple or others. I think that’s great. But I find myself reading about one of those commitments and saying, that’s really fantastic. Where’s everybody else in that sector? Where are all the other companies and what are they doing? And there’s just, frankly, the level of commitments we’ve already seen and what companies like Interface are doing.
It’s just not happening enough. I’m also, though, really encouraged in the built environment space by kind of the dawning realization that we have a role to play in our space. I think many years ago, People would talk about the issue of global warming. And what did you automatically think of? Fossil fuel, right? Coal-fired power plants. And certainly like for a good reason. But I think that left many sectors thinking like, well, we’re not Right. Right. Right. So we have a real role to play in terms of what the heck we’re doing to design and build and operate new buildings.
And we are a part of that. So we’ve been really encouraged just to see the awareness. Right. Right. Right. Right. You know, thousands of square yards of carpet that’s going into a high rise or if you’re a company that’s going to build 10 new offices and you look at the square footage and you look at the carbon footprint of those products, it really adds up. We have a role to play in solving that. And I think it’s when we can make that connection.
When people who care about this are not just thinking about whether or not they should eat meat or not or how they’re going to drive to work, but when we can make something easy for someone in a job that they do every day, which is picking carpet or flooring for interiors, when we can give you the choice of doing something that actually has a better impact on That’s, I think, when we can really see something significant take hold. Is this part of your climate take-back mission? Is that broadly what that is?
Yep. So we said, look, the climate take-back mission for Interface is to reverse global warming. And as a billion-dollar company with 4,000 people, what does that actually mean for us? Well, it means that our business needs to be carbon negative by 2040 and a big part of that is that our products are going to have to be carbon negative. And so this announcement that we made last week is significant in two ways. The first is that we’ve been working on it for five years and we’ve done a couple prototypes.
We’ve commercialized a line of it in Europe. And this represents the fact that it’s possible because And if it’s possible for us to make this transition, we actually can see a pathway for all of our carpet tile products to be carbon negative eventually. And it gives us a starting point for our resilient products and our rubber products. So it’s significant in that regard to say we think we see a pathway to shift the entire business eventually towards all of the products being carbon negative. But here’s why it’s significant and important.
If we can do it, And our customers see that, they will start asking all of their flooring providers to do that. And then they’ll start thinking about what it means for all the other suppliers to put products in a building. And then the green building councils will see that it’s actually possible to build that into standards and it will snowball. So that’s how a company that’s only 4,000 people actually starts to achieve a mission of reversing global warming. First, we do it here. Then we try to influence everybody else.
Then we try to influence our customers. And hopefully that has a ripple effect that goes on to have influence way beyond our industry.
Ross Kenyon: Here’s a halfway to gibberish kind of question, but I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it because early adopters who make these changes as a company do either embody biomimicry or otherwise have some sort of carbon negative element to their business. When they’re first to They’re getting lots of press, lots of great press. But then what about when companies making carbon removal announcements is no longer so newsy? Why should they still make that change? You could say that maybe they need a social license to operate and their customers are just demanding of that.
And I think that’s true for some, but I imagine it’s not true for everyone. I imagine there are some industries and companies that could survive just making cheap products as cheaply as they can with petroleum-derived materials, etc. Yeah, no.
Erin Meezan: It’s a challenging problem to solve, right? And I agree with you that there’s lots of reasons why companies will be encouraged to do that, whether it’s what we talked about earlier, internal employees. You know, sort of saying we expect this and the war for talent. I don’t think that’s going to impact every single company. Whether customers expect it to me is much more likely. I mean, you talk about the fact that if carbon negative products start to get institutionalized as... A preferred product for large states.
You know, the state of California has a buy clean program where they’re now looking at the global warming potential of construction materials before they buy them. We talked about this with carbon cure. I think they’re included in that. And so that’s going to be a huge message to anyone who’s making construction materials or other materials that any customer would buy. So I do think that’s going to be much more significant than maybe say like employee sentiment. But I think you’re right. There’s still going to be like other people that operate on the very low end of this that even with all of that, They would be dismissive and say that’s still a certain percentage of the market.
I don’t know, frankly, how you can ignore the state of California. But I think there will be companies who will still be not convinced. And that’s the part where I do think in terms of the toolbox of solving this, policy has to come in. Whether that is a carbon tax, whether that is a cap and trade in the United States and in other countries where these companies are headquartered, that’s what has to pick up the kind of very bottom end is the policy end. And it’s not surprising.
I mean, if you look at kind of in the United States... Why we originally passed many, many environmental laws, it was to go after the laggards. It was to go after the people who aren’t going to be influenced by doing the right thing, by customer demand. Eventually, we just have to regulate you. I think that may be a way that we get some of those companies to the level that everyone else will eventually be at.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, once all the UN Global Climate Action Awards are handed out, Aaron, what are they supposed to do? Your interface wins everything.
Erin Meezan: Right. I mean, you know, super excited, by the way, to get a UN Global Climate Action Award. And there are, you know, if you look at kind of the people who’ve won it in the past, these huge brands, Apple, I’m always secretly really excited to say like, wow, we’re only 4,000 people and we are publicly traded and we have done some really innovative things. You wouldn’t think it, right? We’re an unlikely winner of that, but I’m super proud of everybody at Interface. And the great thing about those awards is not this moment that we get to talk about it, but the influence it has on the people who work here.
So it’s one thing for people to hear from our head of sustainability. Hey, it’s really important. Like we’re doing amazing stuff. You guys should feel really proud. And our teams do feel really proud, but it’s really awesome to be able to go back to our teams who’ve put in all the work and the time and effort, not just of making these, but I think often who have the harder job are salespeople of selling these and educating customers on a daily basis about why we’re a carpet company that talks about global warming and why they should care about carbon neutral products.
I am super excited to go back to them and be like, all that hard work that you guys put in, I think it’s super important and so does our CEO. But the damn United Nations thinks that you guys are killing it. And that’s the best moment when we can go back and say, because I know it’s hard to sell people carbon neutral floors, because I know it’s hard to go back to our suppliers and ask them to be better. But man, this is what’s really important.
Ross Kenyon: I just saw the trailer. Your interface is the subject of a documentary I saw. I saw your face pop up in it too. That must be fun.
Erin Meezan: Oh, it was so much fun. A lot of what we do because we’re small is try to influence other companies. And so for the last 25 years, we kind of joke like, we’ll go to the opening of a garage door. We think telling other companies that it’s possible to do it, how we did it, and some of the lessons learned is really important. We’ve certainly been in a lot of videos, but when an independent filmmaker comes to you and says, I’m really inspired by the story and what you guys are doing, and I don’t necessarily want to do a case study on So reorganizing your supply chain, I want to talk about the people who did it and why people come together to do this and what it takes.
That was super exciting to be part of that. And we didn’t contribute financially to the film at all. It was done totally independently. But to have someone take the time to get to know our people and tell the human side of this and it was just really fun. And now that it’s out there, you know, it got... Released for the first time publicly at the Boston Film Festival a couple weeks ago. Now it’s showing at the Denver Film Festival online until November 8th. You can buy tickets.
Now it’s just kind of fun for us to kind of see it. I watched it with my family a couple weeks ago. For the first time and it was pretty emotional. I mean, my dad was there, you know, he’s 80. I don’t think he understands how I got an environmental law degree and why I work for some guy who makes carpet tile and how that relates to reversing global warming. So it was really nice for my dad to sit through that and sort of see what we do and how important it is to us.
So yeah, I think for our employees and everyone else, it’s a really good story about You know, who we are and what we do and why it’s important in the world. Called Beyond Zero. Is that right? Yep. It’s called Beyond Zero, meaning we’ve entered the next phase of getting the company really close to zero footprint and are now exploring that next path that we talked about. What does it mean to be, you know, regenerative? What does it mean to go past zero to something much more exciting?
Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I’m happy that you brought up leadership with other companies and trying to shepherd more people down this path. I know that’s very important to your work and the work of Interface. If anyone out there is listening and they want to emulate Interface or somehow make a few of these early steps, how would you direct them?
Erin Meezan: Yeah. On the kind of less human side, there’s lots of great case studies that have been written. One thing that we published when we marked the occasion of sort of celebrating 25 years of being focused on Mission Zero and sharing where How far we had come in essentially declaring success and setting our new mission, we published something you can find on our website called Lessons Learned. And we could have done a really great sustainability report. And we thought, that’s really self-congratulatory. Who does that help?
Why don’t we write like the 10 things we wish we knew that had a real impact on pushing our strategy forward? And so that’s our lessons learned report. I would definitely say go to our website and read that. And then there’s loads of case studies that have been written on interface and also two books that were actually created by our founder. One was called Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. Which is the most recent. And then the first one was called Mid-Course Correction. Those are great places to sort of understand how do you start and make something take hold, which would have been Mid-Course Correction.
And then how do you maintain that culture and keep it flourishing, which is the second one, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. So I think all of those are great places to start to learn a little bit more about Aaron,
Ross Kenyon: I have a serious question here for you, which is, do you have a message to share for people who are pulling up their carpets and looking for hardwood floors underneath them? Anything you’d like to say to confront this?
Erin Meezan: Well, I would say that I would say first that hardwood and carpet tiles can coexist. And I am a great like fan of that because I have a 1950s house in Atlanta that was all pine floors when I moved in and I use carpet tiles as area rugs. And so I love the functionality of that. You know, I mean, I think carpet has a lot of benefits like sound. Comfort, warmth, controlling indoor dust. There’s lots of reasons why having something fun and warm and to help with sound in your house is fantastic.
I don’t know anyone who lives in a house who has pets or children that just has hardwood floors. I think there’s a reality associated with providing comfort in a space. And obviously in the built environment space, there’s a real reality associated with acoustics and sound and what carpet can do. So I don’t want to convince anybody that they have to buy carpet. I want to convince people who’ve already decided that they have to buy carpet to buy a sustainable one and a carbon negative one. That’s what we’re about.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. You honored what I imagine maybe one of the worst questions you’ve ever been asked with a dignified response. Okay. Kudos to you, Aaron. Okay. Well, links to all of the things we discussed are in the show notes. Is there anything else that we should talk about, Aaron?
Erin Meezan: I mean, where do we start, right? I think the last thing I would end on is, you know, obviously we’re doing this interview the week of the election in the United States. And there’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty in our country right now. And, you know, I think that I would leave everybody with... The kind of amazing positivity that we feel at our company associated with focusing on this mission. And it’s probably something, Ross, you can relate to working at Nori. But I think, you know, we all in the next decade, I would argue in the next six years, are We all should be reexamining what it is that we can do to get involved in solving this global challenge.
I personally believe and Interface believes this is the challenge of our lifetime. And we should all be asking ourselves, what are we doing to address this in business, in our institutions, maybe as individuals? Is it a career change? Can I do something? Can I get my company to do something? And I would say... Don’t sit on the sidelines, but it’s a real challenge to people. If our organization can help you, if we can talk to your CEO, if my CEO can talk to your CEO, if I can talk to your head of manufacturing, please call upon interface or please call upon us individually.
This is something that we cannot have someone else solve for us. So get involved.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. And you ended on such a positive note here too, that we can do it. That’s nice. People respond to that. I’m told that whenever we do a really doer episode, I get notes or a lack thereof, which is just like, people like the agency of what you just said. So, so thanks for ending us on a positive note, Aaron, and thanks for being on the show.
Erin Meezan: I so much enjoyed it. I mean, I’m a huge fan. So I’ll be super excited for this to come out and really look forward to engaging with any of your listeners. And I really look forward to kind of seeing where Nori is going to go.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks, me too. And if you’d like to connect with Aaron Interface, some combination, links are in the show notes. So be sure to open that up. And while you have the app open, if you could give us a nice review in your podcast app, that helps quite a lot. It gets this content out to more people. So please do that if you could. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher.
It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com where there is a newsletter. That’s nori.com slash subscribe. There’s podcast. There’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast at nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community.
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