If he had accomplished nothing else in his professional life, Ray Christie Anderson, IE 56, would be remembered upon his Aug. 8 passing as the founder and chairman of a pioneering, flourishing carpet company. Interface, founded in 1973 on the heels of Anderson’s 14 years in the industry at Callaway Mills and Deering Milliken, became the first manufacturer of free-laying tiles in the United States. Today, it remains the largest maker of modular carpet in the world.
But it was Anderson’s growing concerns with how Interface’s carpet was produced and the whole industry’s impact on the environment that became his ultimate focus in life, and for which he will be most praisingly remembered.
In 1994, he began to steer Interface in a radical direction, demanding an audit of the company’s environmental footprint and then methodically trimming out wasteful manufacturing and spending habits wherever they were found. Years before the idea of “going green” entered mainstream consciousness, he was pushing the biggest player in a radically wasteful industry towards a closed-loop, no-impact system—while keeping shareholders happy, to boot.
“From my experience, it’s a false choice between the economy and ecology. We can have both — and we have to have both,” Anderson told Time magazine in 2007, the same year they named him a “hero of the environment.” He served on the President’s Council on Sustainable Development under President Clinton and authored three books on sustainability in business. In honor of his work to make the world safer and greener for current and future generations, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Tech on Aug. 5, three days before his death.
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