Director: Alright,
whenever you’re ready.
Erin Meezan: There's so much
debate right now
about what companies and countries
should be doing on climate.
Nature is actually the best benchmark.
Why don't we just follow
what it would do?
Nature has 3.8 billion years
of R and D under its belt.
So, you know, there's certainly
something nature has
that maybe humans always don't.
Nature can do complex chemistry,
really interesting engineering.
And so how can we look to nature
and really harness what we know works
to provide solutions for business
to be more sustainable?
[In the Green: The Business
of Climate Action]
[Presented by: TED Countdown
and The Climate Pledge]
[Erin Meezan; Company: Interface;
Sector: Manufacturing; Location: USA]
This is a carpet tile that we make.
We operate in the building
and construction space,
which is close to 40 percent
of global carbon emissions.
So in that space,
we’re putting a lot of materials,
like flooring, into buildings.
When we started
on sustainability as a company,
most of these products
had a significant impact on the planet.
We wasted a lot of resources,
we recycled nothing,
and they had a carbon footprint
that we had never
even measured or understood.
Interface became inspired
to take the company
in a more sustainable direction.
We took our product design team
out in the forest and asked:
How would nature design a floor?
What lessons could nature give us
about moving away
from adhesives in our business?
And that led to an exploration
of gecko's feet
that allowed us to design an innovation
that took the company off glue
and really helped us build
a whole new business
by being inspired by nature.
We did things to reduce waste.
We've swapped out
less sustainable materials
for recycled and bio-based materials.
And so over 20 years,
we've been able to innovate
and create something
that actually stores
more carbon than it emits,
has a net benefit to the environment.
We really challenged ourselves
to say, what's beyond that?
Could we create a factory
that has a positive impact,
and what might that look like?
Nature, for example, harvests
and collects and purifies rainwater.
So what we've done
in some of our factory locations
is install rainwater collection devices
to be able to take that rainwater out,
use that in our manufacturing operations.
Nature stores carbon.
And so we have opportunities
onsite through planting,
possibly removal of parking lots,
possibly by establishing green roofs,
to store carbon on-site
and in the buildings within our company.
And I'm really excited now
that it's not just Interface
trying to figure this out.
Other companies started
to hear us talking about it
and got really interested in it.
We could share the work that we had done,
and other companies
could accelerate their learning,
but also they committed to share
what they were doing.
And we're hopeful that this will
continue to pick up momentum.
I think the question for everybody is:
What’s your carbon-negative carpet tile?
It goes from the idea
of a sustainable carpet tile
to a sustainable building
to a sustainable city.
If we're going to meaningfully
address global warming,
we have to imagine not just
these products alone,
but the collective effort
of what we can do together
to have a positive impact
on the environment.