The urge to conserve is obvious at the Interface Corp., from slogans painted on the factory floor ("One Planet/Zero Harm"), to prize parking spots reserved for car-poolers, to packing boxes so relentlessly recycled that they sit, wrinkled and battered, festooned with the remains of previously applied masking tape (bought from Germany, because the extra adhesive in American masking tape causes more wear and tear).
Less obvious is the way the company now looks at all of its processes, from the time designers think of a new pattern until customers return their worn-out carpet for recycling.
For example, when the company decided in 2000 to introduce a new line of carpet tiles, designers began by asking, "How would nature make a floor?" They thought of forests, where the ground is covered by pebbles, leaves, twigs, soil. "What they discovered was everything is random, it's never the same, and it's always beautiful," said Stuart Jones, vice president of sustainable development for Interface Research and Development.
This biomimicry produced Entropy, now one of Interface's hottest patterns. Its randomness allows it to be applied any-which-way and tremendously reduces the amount of finished tiles that must be rejected as "off-quality."
The nylon cloth facing for Entropy, and other patterns, is made a few miles from here, in another Interface plant at West Point. An engineer there figured out that running the tufting machines with many relatively small creels of fiber, rather than fewer large creels, would greatly reduce waste -- "about $180,000 worth of first-quality nylon" annually, Jones said.
The rubbery backing for the tiles is applied at the plant here, where some of the company's greatest progress has been made. For example, company engineers worked with city engineers to find out how much methane, a greenhouse gas, was coming out of the LaGrange municipal dump. The answer, it turned out, was enough to power the Interface plant there for probably 40 years, Jones said. So the company agreed to adapt its boilers and buy the gas, if the city would pipe it in.
 The upshot was abundant power, cheaper than the natural gas it replaced; a multimillion-dollar revenue stream for LaGrange; longer life for its landfill, whose volume decreases as methane is drawn off; and a more pleasant environment for the dump's neighbors.
And because the LaGrange plant is now diverting methane away from the atmosphere, and because methane is a much more powerful heat-trapper than carbon dioxide, "those credits set off all of our activities in North America," Jones said.
Like others at Interface, he wishes the nylon in used carpet tiles could be recycled for new carpet, a feat not now fully within anyone's grasp. But in recent years the plant has been able to use worn tiles in making backing for new carpet. It markets the results as "Cool Carpet," and customers love it. Business is "fantastic," Jones said, and "last year we diverted 16.8 million pounds from landfill."
The company is also experimenting with small sheets of plastic that could be used to attach tiles to one another and, it is hoped, eliminate the need for glue and the volatile organic compounds that come with it.
Like others at Interface, Jones acknowledges that the easiest problems are solved quickest and that finding new ways to improve environmental performance is becoming harder. It helps that everyone in the company is eligible for an annual bonus, and the bonus depends on meeting both production and sustainability goals.
"Sometimes it's difficult to keep it energized," Jones said. "But that's where I think the culture of the company embracing the concept has built momentum."

New York Times News Service