Ray Anderson, sustainable business pioneer and Mitchell Prize recipient, dies at 77
August 9, 2011 - Ray C. Anderson, a green business pioneer and 2001 recipient of the George and Cynthia Mitchell International Prize for Sustainable Development, has died at 77.
Anderson was the founder of Atlanta-based Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet. Houston businessman and philanthropist George Mitchell founded the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), which is dedicated to improving human and ecosystem well-being through the application of sustainability science and principles of sustainable development.
The Sustainable Business Blog of Britain’s Guardian newspaper, reporting Anderson’s death, related his account of how he became committed to business sustainability:
As he recalled in his extraordinary book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, his own paradigm shift came when he was being asked to provide his company with an environmental vision – and the best that he could come up with was that they should "comply with all the many rules and regulations that government agencies seemed to love to send our way." Then, "as if by pure serendipity," Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce, landed on Ray's desk – and triggered an intense personal crisis.
Suddenly realizing that mankind is headed into ecological overshoot, he often described the moment he got the message as "an epiphany, a rude awakening, an eye-opening experience, and the point of the story felt just like the point of a spear driven straight into my heart."
Anderson was honored in 2001 as the seventh recipient of the $100,000 Mitchell Prize, Mitchell and his wife Cynthia had established the prize in 1974, eight years before HARC’s founding, to recognize outstanding contributions to sustainable development.
The 2001 prize was given to an "individual in the corporate setting or an individual who has made corporate sustainable development activities possible." In association with that theme, HARC organized the Woodlands Conference, a two-day colloquium that explored the changes, capabilities and tools needed to help corporations achieve sustainability.
"Ray Anderson is a pioneer in using innovative approaches to change past practices and to eliminate waste," Mitchell said at the time. "His vision of how sustainable technology can be used as a core principle in doing business is exemplary."
The Mitchell Prize selection committee, organized by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), cited Anderson for his pioneering vision, his leadership in striving to achieve sustainability in his company, his passion in challenging others to achieve sustainability worldwide and his humanity.
"No corporate leader in the United States has done more to set an example that moves us into the world of the future, where new models of operating sustainably must become the standard," said Bruce Alberts, NAS president at the time.
Anderson became chairman, president and CEO of Interface, Inc., in 1973. After reading Hawken's book and Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael in 1994, he became aware of the detrimental impact that industry, and even his own company, were having on world resources. He soon instituted an innovative program to transform Interface – first by making it a "sustainable" company in all practices and eventually to make it a "restorative" company – one that returns to the earth more than it takes.
In the six years prior to his selection as recipient of the Mitchell Prize, Interface undertook more than 400 sustainability initiatives, including the design of new carpets and fabrics that were 100 percent recyclable at the end of their use and the development of the first "climate-neutral" floor covering product, Solenium. Fortune Magazine, dubbing Anderson the "Green CEO" in 1999, singled him out for his conversion to "environmentalism" and subsequent accomplishments.
Anderson's book, Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model, outlined the steps his firm took to develop new business models that safeguard the environment. Before being honored with the Mitchell Prize, he served as co-chair of the President's Council on Sustainable Development and received the 1996 Global Green USA Millennium Award for Corporate Environmental Leadership as well as the 1996 Georgia Conservancy Distinguished Conservationist Award.
The last Mitchell Prize recipient before Anderson was Dr. Marcello de Andrade, a Brazilian physician credited with teaming corporations and local stakeholders to fight the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon forest. He received the prize in 1997.