His story is now legend. In 1994, after reading The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson felt a “spear in the chest.” The founder of Interface, Inc., a billion-dollar carpeting manufacturer, realized that his company was plundering the environment and he needed to steer it on a new course. Since then, Interface has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by eighty-two percent, with a goal to reach a zero environmental footprint by 2020. Thoughtful and winning, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist shows how Anderson revolutionized his company—improving quality, bringing costs down, and driving up profits—making it one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For. He challenges all industries to share his ambitious goal: to take nothing from the earth that can’t be replaced by the earth.
Ray Anderson was named one of Time magazine’s Heroes of the Environment in 2007 and one of MSN.com’s Top 15 Green Business Leaders in 2007 and has received the Purpose Prize from Civic Ventures. He and Interface have been featured in the documentary movies The Corporation and The 11th Hour, as well as in the New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, and many other publications.
Robin White has been an oil-well roughneck, oil-well-logging engineer, science writer, community energy planner, and an architect by vocation, an instrument-rated pilot by avocation. He has lived all over the United States and in Europe, including Russia and Siberia. He now lives near Monterey, California, with his wife.