Ray C. Anderson

Supplemental Content

In the book’s Appendix, you’ll find two schematics that Ray Anderson has described as the heart of the Interface plan. These two schematics are included here, with a more expanded description than you will find in the book.

FIG1

In this schematic our company, with its people, its processes, its capital, and its values, is in the center. Its suppliers (lower left) take materials (organic and inorganic) from the earth’s lithosphere and produce our raw materials, which we convert to products and sell to our customers (right) that comprise our marketplace. Stuff flows in one direction, money in the other direction. A small part of our raw materials is natural, comes from the biosphere (top), and eventually returns to the biosphere as biodegradable waste. We are also connected to the biosphere by the waste and emissions our processes create. The vast majority of our products, at the end of their useful lives, go to landfills and incinerators, in either case creating a pollution load for Earth’s biosphere to digest (some of over a 20,000 year span). We are connected to our communities (bottom), too. Our people come from there; their wages return. Our capital comes from there; dividends and interest return. Our laws and regulations come from there (through the various governments); our taxes return. This is the typical company of the 20th century and early 21st Century. Little has changed—yet.

This is also the general picture of the entire industrial system. Every supplier is like the company in the middle of the diagram. Likewise, so is every customer. Consequently, this is the schematic for the present, unsustainable, linear, take-make-waste, fossil fuel-driven, abusive industrial system, with its focus on increasing labor productivity. In this general picture, even less has changed—yet.

FIG.2

A successful climb of all seven faces to the summit of Mount Sustainability will result in an entirely new schematic:

All undesirable linkages, gone. The umbilical cords to Earth for materials, severed! New, vital linkages, in place. Sustainable: waste-free, benign, cyclical, renewable (for materials and energy), resource-efficient, and tightly connected to suppliers, customers, communities, and among ourselves. Altogether, an “ecosystem”that is moving up Mount Sustainability together, with trust and cooperation replacing confrontation. Taking nothing. Doing no harm. And winning in the marketplace, not at the expense of the earth or future generations, but nature’s way: by outcompeting the slow-to-adapt, those competitors who never quite “get it.” And growing, even in a no-growth world, should we come to that, by increasing value and market share, but not impact. Only zero impact (zero footprint) is sustainable into an indefinite future, i.e., over evolutionary time.

This is “Doing Well by Doing Good,” a new and better business paradigm. This is the schematic of the sustainable corporation of the future and of
the sustainable industrial system of the future.

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