Erin Meezan: What nature can teach us about sustainable business | In The Green

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.