On the Green Floor
Waste, in all is myriad forms, is the biggest environmental challenge for the 21st century.
The new agenda of environmental sustainability is driving companies to think and behave in new ways and comes against a background of unprecedented advances in technology and rising consumption, with the world facing the twin challenges of climate change and resource depletion.
External pressure from regulators and governments and an increasingly knowledgeable customer base have, of course, led many companies to introduce environmental policies—and for facility management professionals to increasingly seek green companies to do business with.
However, the problem with much environmental practice is that it is driven simply by reducing carbon footprints— such as using less energy in the manufacturing process and reducing pre-consumer waste. It is an environmental model of being “less bad” rather than “truly good.” However, importantly, it simply perpetuates a "cradle-to-grave" business model, where products that have reached the end of their useful lives are considered worthless.
It’s a business model that the carpet industry has traditionally followed and, in terms of waste, makes for grim reading.
Out with the old, in with the new
U.S. statistics suggest that carpeting is replaced on average every seven years, despite usually having a guaranteed life of 10 to 25 years. That means that a lot of perfectly good carpeting is thrown away every year, because it’s faded or just feels dated.
That adds up to millions of square feet of carpet every year, and most of it is left to rot in landfill sites where it takes 50 years for natural fibers (such as wool) to break down, and 250,000 years for manmade fibers (such as nylon) to degrade. That’s a large number of years and a huge wasted resource when much of that material could be used again.
According to a U.K. study carried out for the Contract Flooring Association, about 600,000 tons of carpet are thrown out in the U.K. every year. One estimate suggests that in the developed world some 2 percent of landfill waste is made up from old carpeting. Multiply those statistics across the world and you get a sense of the scale of the problem.
It’s an issue that is now of real concern to the carpet industry, with all the larger companies voluntarily addressing issues of sustainability—taking old carpet materials back into carpet production, recycling old carpet into alternative products such as building materials and auto parts, and refurbishing old carpet into new carpet tiles.
Despite the significant problems involved in collecting, sorting and transporting post-consumer carpet to be reprocessed, it’s a challenge that carpet and fiber companies are addressing, often working in partnership with entrepreneurial businesses which are creating local or regional carpet and textile collection sites, from which old carpets can, at least in part, be reprocessed. Nor is it a processing journey within the carpet industry alone. For example, polyethylene terephthalate plastic beverage bottles are now being recycled in their millions to make polyester carpet fibers.
In a myriad of ways, the carpet industry is positively addressing the environmental agenda, certainly in the developed world where production costs are relatively high, and the economic benefits of energy and waste reduction provide a valuable economic return. In other words, thinking green can be a good thing for the bottom line.
It’s an approach that generally starts with quantifying a company’s carbon footprint, identifying ways of reducing it through minimizing waste, recycling, changing to renewable sources of energy and setting incremental targets to improve performance throughout the manufacturing and distribution chains. However, it’s a process that doesn’t make complete and coherent sense—looking holistically at the entire business.
Cradle to Cradle®
A better philosophy is called Cradle to Cradle®. In 2002, German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough heralded it with their book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.” Its central premise is that products should be conceived from the very start with intelligent design and the intention that they would eventually be recycled, as either ‘technical’ or ‘biological’ nutrients. “Time Magazine” has called it “a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world.”
It models human industry on the natural world, in which materials are nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It’s a philosophy that uses nature as a metaphor for how people can redesign everything that they do—including manufacturing industry—to be more eco-effective.
It brings a new methodology to the design of processes, products and services, by looking at raw materials both in terms of their intrinsic value and how—at the end of that product’s useful life—they can be taken apart and recycled (or “up-cycled”) into products that may have a value and sophistication beyond that of their original use. Simply, it’s a philosophy of birth-to-rebirth.
A birth-to-rebirth philosophy may sound deceptively simple but it turns conventional sustainability on its head because conventional thinking is all about a language of negatives. The green lobby talks about minimizing human impacts, zero footprints, banning harmful substances or reducing energy use.
This approach is, of course, better than doing nothing. But effectively, what it’s saying is that adopting a “less bad” approach is inherently ethical. What a Cradle to Cradle® company says instead is that it doesn’t matter how much product is manufactured or how much waste is created because waste simply become the raw materials or nutrients for further manufacturing—with products being reborn and reborn. It’s a philosophy that looks at the world with a new perspective because it doesn’t romanticize nature or demonize factories or manufacturing processes. It’s an approach that accepts that, in the modern world, we need to make things—and the goal should be to find ways that balance commercial activity with the natural world.
To put it another way—the language of conventional sustainability says that we should hold on to products for longer, whether it’s a car or a mobile phone, and to therefore conserve the world’s resources. However, this approach only slows change and goes against human instinct. After all, do you really want your laptop to last 25 years? Or to use the same cell phone a decade from now?
Instead, Cradle to Cradle® makes planned obsolescence respectable. It encourages consumers to buy more products but to do so from innovative companies that have policies in place to recycle old products, turning waste into new products or into nutrients.
That closed loop philosophy doesn’t necessarily mean turning old products into identical new products. It means designing products that can be disassembled and used again in a continuous and virtuous cycle, where the intrinsic value of each component is preserved or enhanced. The Cradle to Cradle® philosophy therefore eliminates the concept of waste and some in the carpet industry are now working toward a time when all waste or worn-out carpet becomes a source of nutrient, designing in features that allow old carpet to be entirely taken apart and reused.
Coming full cycle
One aspect is particularly exciting—taking back old carpet— underlines how much the carpet industry’s model will further change and how it impacts on all Cradle to Cradle® companies. In some countries, a lot of old floor covering is incinerated in power stations, which of course, is better than nothing. In others, it’s simply thrown into landfill, despite costing that company money to do so. What Cradle to Cradle® manufacturers are saying is give us the money instead and we’ll turn your rubbish into new carpet. That significantly means that customers won’t really be buying their carpet and merely paying for its use, with the materials remaining the manufacturer’s responsibility. That is a huge shift in thinking but one that offers an ethical model of how business can and perhaps should be done.
Cradle to Cradle® is catching imaginations with more and more companies adopting its principles. Indeed, in parts of Europe, a growing number of government and municipal tenders must meet Cradle to Cradle® procurement policies.
Importantly, Cradle to Cradle® not only makes good environmental sense, it is also good for business. It’s a business model that can work across the manufacturing sector and not just floor-covering manufacturers because customers can see that it offers a joined-up philosophy. It’s also a concept that facility management professionals should engage with because Cradle to Cradle® may yet change the design of the world, and not just in the carpeting industry.
Stef Kranendijk has been the Chief Executive Officer of Desso since 2007. He has many years of experience in investing and running a variety of companies. In addition, Kranendijk is Co-Owner and Partner of Sares Invest BV—a growing assetmanagement firm. Until 2009, he also was a board member of Sterling Strategic Value Ltd., a well-reputed investment firm taking positions in public companies. Prior to his independent entrepreneurship, he held a variety of leadership positions at Stanley Works and Procter & Gamble.
