Sustainable Flooring That’s Changing Homes (and the Planet!)

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, we're excited to have Mikhail Davis. He's the Director of Global Market Sustainability at Interface, where they're a leader in making circular and sustainable flooring.

Hi, Ian.

flooring materials. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ian. Fun to be here.

Absolutely. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So before we dive into what you do now and where Interface is today, let's go back a little bit and some about this journey of sustainability, how flooring— most people don't think of flooring as sustainable or Don't even think about it really. We just walk on it. It's probably what most people do. But I'd love to correct that image a little bit and have you go through kind of how did this come about tackling sustainability and flooring?

Yeah. So Interface is interesting. I've been in sustainability for over 30 years. And for that entire time, Interface has been a reference point, which is interesting. So I spent the last 13 years at Interface, but previous 17, I knew about Interface because a funny thing happened to Interface in 1994. A couple customers for one project in Southern California asked like, hey, we're doing a green building. This is really early days. Like US Green Building Council had been invented 2 years before that. And so no one really knew what it was.

Right.

They wanted to know, what is your company doing for the environment? Because we want to use green flooring. We did not even know how to answer that question at the time. Right. The Enviro-what?

Right.

But we did take customer comments seriously. And so eventually a task force was convened to figure out what are we doing on this environment thing besides just obeying the law in Georgia, which frankly isn't that stringent. So this group meets, the task force came back and then they asked the founder and CEO, Ray Anderson, hey, we want you to give a task kickoff of the task force meeting. Will you tell us what your environmental vision for the company is? Because They kind of figured that was how they could get other people to show up for the meeting, if this sort of legendary founder and CEO was there.

Right. Good move.

And he grudgingly agreed to do this, at which point he admitted that the problem was that he did not have an environmental vision, as he liked to say in his wonderful Georgia drawl. When I encountered Ray in 1997, that was one of the things that grabbed my attention. Like, here's this guy giving a very heartfelt talk on the environment who is One, first weird thing, a CEO. Second weird thing, has an amazing South Georgia drawl. So like he's from small town Southwest Georgia and sounds like it.

Right, right.

So long story short, he ends up getting desperate and like someone drops a book on his table about sustainability and business, you know, Paul Hawkins, The Ecology of Commerce. He has nothing the night before and decides to read this thing. And ends up staying up most of the night because what he reads in that book, which sort of implicates business in the destruction of the environment, but also says that business is probably the only institution capable of reversing this destruction. It's the problem and the solution that keeps him up all night. He writes this speech, you know, as he said, cribbing almost entirely from this book, and blows the minds of this task force. They walk out of there like not sure if the CEO has just had like a psychotic break or what. But some of them out of this end up getting pretty inspired and eventually they come back with what he asked for. He said, I want you to give me a plan for how we become sustainable and then restorative. So this is a serious 0 to 60.

Like, he—

within 24 hours, he knows almost nothing, and then he has told at least this core group within his company that we want to become the first sustainable and then restorative industrial company.

And restorative at a whole new level on time. Like, sustainability has been the goal for a long time, and restorative is like That extra step we're just talking about more.

He later explained that he had happened to have just met— Ray was an old engineer and loved to talk to other engineers. So he was talking to an engineer from NASA who had told him that one of their biggest problems was that they created the moonshot and they succeeded too quickly. And then NASA kind of lost its way. We accomplished the impossible. And then we had nothing after that.

Right.

So his idea was like, I'm gonna give you a moonshot sustainability. And by the way, Mars.

Ray just keeps that going.

Because the thing that was in Interface, I love some companies will go back and greenwash their history. Like, we've cared about sustainability since 1847 when Farmer Brown founded it in his barn. Like, no. Well, Farmer Brown was probably trying to survive. It all comes from oil. We never thought about this a day in our lives before 1994, and we were around for 20 years before that. So I think it's pretty important that we start with this idea of humility and that we're part of the problem.

Right.

And I think that's pretty distinctive, especially in this day and age where there's now enough of a demand for it that everyone wants to say, oh yeah, I'm totally for that. Always been for that. Whereas our story has really been one of You know, Ray Anderson in the late '90s ended up on the COVID of Fortune magazine with the title, I Believe People Like Me Will One Day Go to Jail, which sounds even better in a South Georgia drawl. So he had this very unusual playbook of throwing himself under the bus, but by extension, all of industry.

Yeah.

He addressed this group of CEOs once and he said, greetings, fellow plunderers. May I call you fellow plunderers? So he very much challenged business as a whole for the last 17 years of his life. He passed away in 2011, but he spent the last 17 years of his life kind of trying to undo the previous rest of his life, which he really felt had been contributing to this very damaging industrial system.

Right. There's a lot to be changed. It takes a lot of work. So it's a large task.

And the thing that he did have, and I always encourage when companies take on sustainability, you have to look at what are you already accidentally doing right? Because usually you weren't founded with sustainability in mind. Right.

Yes.

So Ray Anderson already, there are a couple of things he had going for him that still live in Interface today. One, we have a commitment to innovation. They were created to disrupt the carpet industry, which had been all rolls of carpet. We popularized the carpet tile, putting it in a modular system rather than one giant roll that when something gets damaged, the whole thing is kind of damaged. We can just replace one tile at a time. Modularity is the second thing we had right. Turns out that's the way nature designs. We're made of— we're not one big blob. We're made of teeny tiny cells because nature designs in modules, which has inherent sustainability and healing and repair benefits to it. If we were just one big sack and you put a hole in it, we're done. But as it is, you know, you burst one cell, we're good. Right, right.

It's an important feature. I like that one myself.

So I would say the innovation and sort of KISS culture of disruption, which sustainability became the biggest disruptor of all once we really figured out how far off we were from that.

Right.

And then modularity was another thing. And then we had to fix the fact that all of our stuff was made, all the energy was from fossil fuels and all the raw materials were from fossil fuels. So we were in a big hole, and that's kind of been what we've been working on ever since. Now we make some other kinds of flooring, which also need similar open-heart surgery in terms of the supply chain. What is this made from? How do we make it? It's a fun company to work for because we are doing important work, explicitly trying to influence industry as a whole. So we kind of just actually solve the problems, not just make ourselves look greener.

Right.

And we get to be pretty honest about where we're at. Kind of continuing in Ray's initial philosophy of, let's be clear, we don't have this nailed. Even after 30 years of working on sustainability, we still have so far to go.

Right. I think that's such a huge thing to say and really important in sustainability because a lot of people, they feel the pressure to greenwash because there's like this zero and one. You're either not sustainable or you're sustainable. And there's nobody gives any space in between to like, Get there. And that kind of harsh attitude, it really adds to the feeling of, oh, well, I got to pretend to be sustainable or that I've been sustainable since 1854, right? This whole idea and not acknowledging what you guys are, which is it's a process. It takes— yeah, there's some things you can change in a day, right? But there's a lot of things that take a lot of time. They take resources. And if you do those wrong and too quickly, even sometimes you can end the company. The company may not survive, in which case, where are we at? We're in the same spot, just with less people who care having the resources to make the changes. And so it's always— I always appreciate it when people are— we're having— have these conversations. They go, yeah, it's a process. We're in process. We're not going to tell you we're there yet. We're getting there. We're doing the things. So I think that's so important.

One of my favorite Ray Anderson quotes addresses this fundamental question of once it got to be a certain— in the 1990s, not many people were talking about this. He tried to hold a summit in, I think, early '97, or maybe it was late '96, where he invited all these CEOs. He's the CEO of a publicly traded company. He thinks maybe if he invites all these CEOs personally, they'll come to this summit on He rented out this whole place in Lake Placid, New York. He had to repurpose the venue because he'd already rented it for an internal meeting.

Wow. That's a lot of change then from— I mean, think about how many sustainability-focused events now happen.

Oh yeah, every day. I mean, I did help organize one when I was in consulting that the CEO of Walmart called. We got hundreds of CEOs. Now it was Walmart. It wasn't the CEO of some carpet company you've never heard of, but of course, We had been holding Walmart's hand, like calling Interface once they were like, oh, we're interested in sustainability. Who's doing it? Interface came running. Ray Anderson met with the CEO. So he was jumped anytime a CEO expressed interest because early days there was nobody interested.

Right.

But yeah, so even, you know, that was 2007 that I organized that event. Even accounting for Walmart's clout, it was a different day. CEOs knew they had to actually pay attention, especially if a big customer like Walmart Ask them about it.

Right. There's enough weight to do that.

But in 10 years, a lot changed there in terms of just the norms of how on the radar this was for big companies. Early days, the first time Ray talked to Wall Street people about sustainability, we had a huge sell-off of our stock next day. It was so not mainstream. They actually thought he had some sort of— he was dying. That was their only one investor we talked to. We have like, why did you dump our stock? Like, well, I figured your founder and CEO must be dying to be talking about all his legacy and all this non-financial stuff. Wow. I just think it's useful in today's age to understand how crazy it was when Ray Anderson started talking about this. This was not normal.

It's been a long and very, relatively long, right? It's been a long, but it's been a long time and it's nowhere near what it was. It's a big change, but It's also great to point out that we're not there yet either. And I think that's where we're talking about your role right now. If the market is still, as much as you and I are sitting here, we know, we understand how valuable and important this is. There's lots of people in the world that do. There's still more that are not, they're not as interested or aware. And so even your role is to help the market learn about it because there's so much to go there. And I would love for you to kind of talk about that in terms of, you know, you've seen it shifting, right? You know where it was, '90s, a long time ago. It's very— so much has changed and we still have a ways to go in that. In the recent years though, I feel like there has been a pickup. There has been an increase in Adaptation. I would love your thoughts on that though. Like, how have you seen it? How is it changing for you guys as you've been trying to guide the guide ever since he's tried to get CEOs into a room and talk about it? How is that changing? How's that evolving for you guys seeing the market, all those work that people have been doing to change minds?

Yeah, I think there's been this sort of, and it's been very much a collective effort there. I think there is a background level of awareness of this as a serious issue that actually affects people. I think Some of it is driven just by more people having had an actual experience of, say, an extreme weather event or some particular local environmental issue being very visibly obvious in the area. Because that is really one of the challenges with these big environmental problems, and climate change is probably the worst. They're like slow and systemic and not obvious, and humans are not adapted to respond to that sort of a, like, non-crisis, frankly. Our whole limbic system is designed to run away from lions, not to think about long-term systemic collapse.

Right.

Not really. If you see some sign of it, you don't necessarily put that together as an urgent thing. You're like, okay, weird hailstorm today, not a lion.

Right, right, right. Not a lion. It's not a lion. We're good.

So, I mean, that is the challenge. What I think our focus has been is trying to get people the easy button to the degree that you can on this stuff to say, how do you think about this? And then what do you do about it? You're a busy person. How do you actually understand the sort of the system thing? And then what is a very specific thing that we can try to make it easier for you to do today? You know, and it starts with, I mean, looking for recycled content. That was an early one. That was kind of the best we could do. You know, that's a good indicator. It's a simple, like, look for the percentage, and then you layer on, is it post-consumer content or is it post— pre-consumer or post-industrial?

Right.

You kind of have to start with something that's actually actionable and to start to get people to know what to look for. We've moved on. A lot of our focus now is on trying to get people to think about embodied carbon. It's like, what is the— how much carbon, these heat-trapping gases, ended up in the atmosphere to make whatever this thing is you're buying?

Mm-hmm.

And obviously we're gonna apply that to flooring, but we never stop with flooring. We always wanna take whatever the approach is to the marketplace and say, here's the right approach to everything. And then frankly, by the way, if you use this approach for flooring, you'll probably end up picking ours. And so that's kind of the scenario we're trying to put it in is a sort of win-win. We win and the broader, you know, set of issues around climate change, there's a win. Because frankly, if you were to just say, oh, we, we look at the, the carbon footprint or embodied carbon emissions, of our flooring and we don't really pay any attention to what steel or concrete we're using in that building, that's not a win for climate. That's just a win for us.

Right, right.

Because if you're building a new building, the flooring is probably 5 to 10% tops of the carbon footprint of that building. So what we want to teach you is metrics and methodologies to use that apply to flooring. Yes. So that helps us. We stay in business, but also impacts the system much more broadly.

Right.

So we, we created a whole coalition of people from different manufacturing companies who are all trying to get people to do this accounting. What's the carbon footprint of what you're buying for all these different building product categories so that then we can eventually move in the direction of, okay, we're keeping score on the right things. What we're keeping score on is the, how much carbon's ending up in the atmosphere. What if that became a negative number? What if all of the processes to make all these building products actually net-net took carbon out of the atmosphere? Now we're reversing global warming. And so you've created a scoring system that can actually get you there. We got to get past zero and into negative. And now we're starting to talk about restoration. We're talking about restorative materials, carbon-negative materials. We call them carbon-positive too, but you know, it's all very confusing. In any case, we're trying to take carbon out of the atmosphere. But getting people to take the first baby steps on that, we've had to do. Frankly, if you look back at what we've done, it's been a 25-year journey. We had to get people to know, how do you measure greenhouse gases?

Yeah.

First at the company level, you know, how much carbon ends up in the atmosphere just for you to stay in business? We had to create protocols for that. We were very involved in that. At the product level, lifecycle assessment, how do we know how much impact you created to make that product. We've been right in the middle of helping that whole science emerge, which in 2000, when we started doing it, was very primitive and only done inside companies, and now is taught in every university, and there's international standards, and everyone who's doing a LEED project is asking for environmental product declarations, which is just a formal document for your product about what its lifecycle impacts were, including that. embodied carbon emission. And then we get to the point that once you have all those pieces in place, okay, we've got, you know, what a greenhouse gas is, we know how to do lifecycle assessment, we know how to publish it in an EPD. Then you say, okay, and now you can go look up the carbon footprint. And then your main criteria, you just have to say, we want a lower number.

Great.

You're buying concrete, you're buying sheetrock or wallboard, you know, stuff behind me. I went and looked. And we had to create a tool because no one wants to read these technical documents. We had to create an online tool that reads them all for Right. Okay. So we helped fund that. It came out of the University of Washington initially, and now it's a separate NGO called Building Transparency. But I could go in when I needed to get a couple sheets of wallboard and say, what's the lowest carbon footprint wallboard? And go find that one, ask my contractor for it.

Right.

So that's the kind of stuff that most companies would never go that deep. They'd be just like, oh, you know, does our product seem green? Do we have a green certification? Do we have some sort of green seal of approval? That's probably good enough.

Right.

But if you actually want to change the system, you have to dig in deeper and think beyond your products and think about how you make it easy for people to get in the game.

Well, I think it's, it's so important, right?

You're—

the way you're thinking about this is it's a whole system. If your goal is to have a sustainable building, you're going to want all the things in it to be sustainable. You're going to want to— you really are thinking about all those things. And so if there's just one sustainable product, then yeah, you know, you might get it, but it's a harder sell because it's not— they don't have value to their customers, right? You're building the building and you're going to sell it to someone, rent it out to someone. The renter doesn't really care if you made something inside the wall nobody can see sustainable. They're like, oh, cool, great, you use sustainable screws. That doesn't mean anything to me. That doesn't impact my overall experience. But when you talk about, oh, the whole building, everything, or 90% of it, then you can say, well, I live, I work, I whatever it is in a sustainable building. And now that value continues. So I feel like there's so much that we kind of silo off. We're like, oh, I do flooring. Like, I'll just— we just read, but we're part of this system, especially in the built environment. Not that I know of. There's nobody that makes all the materials possible to build a building. You're going to use different companies. And so this bringing them into that conversation and going, here's a tool, let's make it easy. You're right. Nobody, especially designers, don't want to typically go through these material sheets constantly. I never enjoyed those. It's not my— I didn't become a designer.

That's been what I've learned is that The average person working on a building has such tight timelines, and you're only one of a thousand decisions they have to make. You make one of the building products, but they've got ten other ones just that day that they've got to kind of analyze and make a decision on. And so you really have to. People want to do the right thing by and large, but they're so pressed for time, and then you know budget is another issue. But and those are very obviously intimately related. So we've had to figure out, and I come from. sustainability nerd land. So we want to get into all the details, but they don't have time to get into the details. You have to be able to distill down, okay, what's the most important thing? And I think that's where the embodied carbon conversation, because we've done so much legwork to make it credible to say, okay, this product has a footprint of 2 kilos and that one has a footprint of 7, pick the 2.

Right.

It really is a pretty good— the back end of that is well enough done that you can confidently say, yeah, the 2 It's 2 versus 7 that matters.

Right.

Just pick the 2. I know you're busy.

Right. Well, I think that's a good point, right? It's distilling because there's—

if you're—

and I'm sure you've done this— look at all the different properties you can have for a material, right? There's so many. Like that sheet, there's so many ways to measure its physical characteristics, its length of life, how you can use it. Its sustainability footprint, there's, and we keep adding more and more things. Carbon footprint wasn't something you could find on a material sheet 30 years ago. That wasn't, nobody did that. But now, and so you have, it's almost information overload. If you're really, if you wanna make a decision between 10 materials, you're like, wow, there's so much to choose from. So being able to narrow that down and go, here's like the top key metrics. Right? Can it physically do what you need? Right? Strength, material, all that. And then here's at least the one good number you can use to compare. And then it's just comparison. Like you said, 2 and 7. Well, pick the 2. It's easy.

It becomes easy. It has to be that easy. And whenever we do education, and so this is my— I love the complexity of it, but you have to be able to— there's a great Oliver Wendell Holmes quote on simplicity and complexity, which I won't attempt to repeat, but it's basically, if you have simplicity, On this side, you know, without going through the complexity, not very valuable. If you have simplicity that has come through a process of analyzing the complexity, that's really valuable.

Yeah.

That's what you want. And that's what we've kind of done with some of the carbon footprint work is to do a lot of the complexity in the background, end up with a, just look for a low number.

That's easy.

And that's simplicity on the other side of complexity. And that's very valuable as opposed to if you're just sort of making something up that just hasn't really gone through the process of analysis. Because at least that's an oversimplification, but it's going to be directionally correct if you've actually gone through the complexity.

Right. I like your way to describe it. It's going to head you in the right direction. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's kind of like, I don't know, general directions. You want to cross the ocean. Well, you head west from here to go to Asia. You'll get there eventually. You may not land in the right spot exactly, but you will get there if you just go west-ish.

And I think you brought up an interesting point that, I mean, one of the challenges is that a lot of the old characteristics we needed to look for in product design or specifications for, which is, you know, basically the requirements for what a product has to do in a building, the old stuff hasn't gone away. We still need all of those functional characteristics. Okay, does it repel water? Will it last for 30 years while you're walking on it or whatever the old— does it come in all the colors you want?

Oh yeah.

It has to be under this price. All that stuff is still there. One of my favorite parts, we do a course on material selection where we introduce all these sustainability criteria. It's really a lot about introducing the Common Materials Framework, which is something that the building industry has started to align on. What are the 5 big things that matter when thinking about more sustainable and healthy materials in buildings? So we do a course to kind of introduce that, but first we start asking all the designers in the room, okay, what do you already need to know? Because whatever we add today is on top of that. It's not instead of that, because otherwise that leads to some of the early failures in green design we've seen where it's like, oh, this thing is so green and so amazing and it costs twice as much.

Right.

Or it comes in only a dirty gray.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or lasts half as long as what you normally would pick. And so you're immediately introducing trade-offs to your existing standards in the name of sustainability. And I think that is one of the places sustainability goes to die in design. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would agree. Once you get into what 5 things matter, and so basically it's climate, chemicals or human health, ecosystem health, social health and equity, and circular economy. There's going to be trade-offs. No product has nailed all 5.

Right.

But if you layer that onto a trade-off with price or quality or other functional characteristics or aesthetics, tough to swallow. There are going to be trade-offs and it could be a product is so amazing on these 5 sustainability categories. You're like, I will pay more for that. But most people won't and you shouldn't count on it.

Right, right. Yeah, even though people are paying more for sustainable products, but it's not— people aren't paying 10 times more. They're not paying these large jumps. Most— I mean, there are people that will, but to your point, don't count on it. It's not a market for something that's 100 times more expensive for a basic requirement in a building that you need to— that you need.

Because the other thing is that If your goal is to change the world, which at Interface it is, and that's why I work here, then if sustainable materials are only available to people with a lot of money, that's not affecting very much of the world.

Right.

So, you know, some of my proudest moments have been when we were able to take some of our most exciting materials from a sustainability perspective and make them available on our cheapest products. That's how you scale. And people say, well, if it costs less, yeah, I do want the 100% recycled nylon made from fishing nets. Yeah, that's easy.

Yeah, that's an easy sell right there.

You know, it's a tougher sell if you're like, this is so cool, we are harvesting fishing nets, keeping them out of the ocean, like, but it costs more. They'd be like, oh, I'd love to spec that maybe on the next project where I have a bigger budget.

I love, I love those too.

Where it's like, show me your cheapest thing. And then you get to tell them, by the way, the cheapest thing also has the fishing nets. That's easy to sell. That's easy to scale.

Right. I love to dive into the materials, right? Because you think of carpets and most people, the average person doesn't really know what all goes into carpets. It's kind of just this—

I know I didn't.

It's unless you work in it and you get familiar with it. So, and you guys do a few different— I know tile carpet is where you innovated heavily, right? One of your first—

Still our bread and butter. I mean, we essentially invented the carpet tile to the degree that we didn't. We bought the European companies that we originally licensed it from. It became so popular in the US that that became the biggest market. And then we went back to Europe where they invented it and kind of bought those companies since we were now bigger than they were. So we can say we invented carpet tile now. But we also sell Nora rubber flooring and we sell LVT because everyone does. That's a really fascinating phenomenon where we just had to get into a market for a product we had no interest in selling because demand was there for a product that wasn't sustainable. So we're like, hmm, we have to go where the demand is, but could we make it more sustainable?

Right. How'd you approach that one?

We approached it, we had to partner. So we're not own manufacturing for any luxury vinyl tile, which was the name come up for it. For the most part, what we're talking about is fake wood.

Okay. Yeah.

10 or 12 years ago, the technology for— there's been fake wood plastic flooring for a long time. It was just really ugly. You could kind of tell like, oh, that's the same knot from over there. You know, and right, right. Immediately recognizes that 10 or 12 years ago, the printing technology for doing these kind of wood looks improved so dramatically. It started to really catch on both in residential and commercial.

Okay.

And at a certain point, it was taking so much market share from us on the carpet tile side that we had to get in the game, which meant we had to find a partner that was willing to kind of go on a journey into sustainability with us, because we don't— we didn't make that kind of flooring. So right now I can say, like, we have the— an improved version of that, but it's still a long way from sustainable. You know, our average for carpet tile is 65% recycled content. We got 39%. When we sell you the vinyl planks. There's a whole segment of market that buys that and it's still growing. There's another segment of the market that says, you know, oh, that's vinyl, that's PVC, that's bad plastic, we don't want that. This really weird moment where you have the market both growing this material and having a backlash against it.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, what it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. So it's kind of starting to split off into very distinct groups for this.

And then we're in the middle where we're supposed to be the most sustainable flooring company, and we still sell it because you can't really be in flooring without selling it right now. I can honestly tell you we'd be out of business had we not, you know, 6 years ago jumped into that. It's, uh, and every company that makes flooring is essentially in that, even if they pretend they aren't. Like, we sell linoleum. We're like, but you sell a lot more vinyl than you do linoleum. It's a tricky material, and then it's super common. It's the 3rd most used plastic in human industry. It's the first most used in buildings, you know, water pipes, siding, roofing membranes, furniture, flooring. Like, it's everywhere. Wiring, cabling, so it's in the walls too. So PVC plastic is kind of everywhere. You hear it called vinyl or PVC, usually the same thing. And because at the same time a lot of advocacy groups have correctly pointed out that there's the whole supply chain for that involves managing a ton of toxic chlorinated gas. Things go wrong in that supply chain very publicly at times. There was a derailment in Ohio a couple years ago of a train carrying vinyl chloride. So what we can tell you is that we audit our supply chain to make sure they're using all the best practices and all the safest things and have very low emissions, but it's still just less bad. And really, the, the market is kind of wanting a— and this, according to what we're working on, A product that does all of the functional things, as we were talking about, the price point, the durability, the aesthetics, without this backstory of like, yeah, hope nothing goes wrong with all that chlorine.

Right. Is this material right for flooring specifically? Is it just there's not really anything else that comes close to it? Is it what's so hard, I guess, Other than, you know, it's always hard to make a duplicate, more sustainable material. Yeah. But what's the challenge with this one that's just making it so hard compared to—

I'd say there's a couple of things, and it's really the, the kind of overlap of this, which is price, performance, and aesthetic. Because we make rubber flooring, but you can't do what we make, and it's like a single layer of rubber. So it's the same thing from top to bottom. It never wears out. Top of it looks bad, you just polish it because it's the same thing all the way through. You can't put a print film on it. You can't make it look like wood or marble or whatever.

Right.

You can make it look like marble a little bit, but you can't capture that same look. It's also not the same price. It lasts longer, but it's definitely not the same price as your sort of standard vinyl plank. So for the price, it provides a really great performance. Also, if you're installing it in modules, that plastic does have characteristics that because it has the chlorine in it, it's basically got salt in it. It doesn't act like a normal plastic. It has a different little bit of a crystalline structure to it. Doesn't expand and contract as much. So you can imagine, you just throw down any plastic, the room gets hotter, the room gets moister, plastic changes shape.

Right.

Less so with PVC plastic. So that's the performance part of it, is that it is less prone to changing shape. So if you have a set of planks and the planks change shape, you get gaps in your flooring, or they start to bow up off the floor, or Any number of other product defects. So you have to be able to replicate that level of expected performance, even under conditions as they change. So especially hot and cold are tricky. So there's a performance piece to it. So that's what we're out there trying to get that. Can we get in the neighborhood of the price? Can we get the same performance? And can we get the looks that people are really wanting? And so, you know, we have ongoing projects to try to do that. In the meantime, we sell a less bad LVT.

Right. I mean, it's, again, I think it's so, it's an important piece. And I think this is where like regulation versus design, there's kind of that carrot and stick side of things in some cases. And when you have such a big market where the demand is so heavy, there's no easy, there's no direct clear path to divert that market to go, hey, here's a product, it's close enough, buy it. You kind of have to— I think it's worthwhile. What you guys have done is go in and go, well, if this has to exist in the world right now, how can we improve it? Can we improve it 10%?

Can we improve—

you said recycled materials, like 39%, right? It's still improvement. It's still, it's still bad, but it is less bad. So how can you impact it when it's— When it's a market that big, if it's, you know, it's the number one flooring material being used, that's a large, like even a 10% improvement is sometimes a larger improvement than trying to launch a competing product that only takes 0.1% market share.

The reality is that if you look at resilient flooring, which is basically all of those sort of hard surface but kind of plastic have some resilience to them. We're not talking about stone or tile or something. They're all going to be sort of some kind of polymer, whether you're talking rubber, over 90% of it is vinyl-based. And so it is until like all the other stuff, the linoleum, the sort of cork blend, the rubber, that's all in that 5 to 10% of other non-vinyl. So you do— the idea that it's all going to be replaced buy something wonderful and bio-based overnight is probably not going to happen. But we do need alternatives. And we need some things that have the potential to scale and to really cut into that 90%. But at the same time, that 90% isn't going anywhere in the near term, and you need to improve that too.

Improve it, and if the sales are there, use that money to pay for all the R&D to replace it. Absolutely.

That is the reality. And I always say it's Sustainability never stops at Interface because of the lack of market demand. But when we have a slow year, we have less money to invest in R&D and things can slow down.

Well, and I think it's what you mentioned too, right? If, you know, if you guys hadn't jumped into that market, if it's 90% of all flooring, like that's, you could have been out of—

90% of resilient flooring, just to be clear, because there's a whole, there's a whole universe of wood flooring and tile and carpet and all that.

Right. Yeah, but still, and that's any segment where that is such a huge piece, it's making an impact. So fixing it in some way, improving it is going to make, going to make a pretty big impact.

And then the question we always ask, which I love that we do ask it because we have goals for our whole product portfolio, is can we get to— there's a lot of products where you can get the low-hanging fruit. You can sort of tighten up the existing problems and make them less bad. Can you get to good? And that's always an interesting question. You theoretically could replace all the plastic except probably the print layer, because it has to be so pure in order to have a really clean image come through on it. You probably would need to use virgin plastic for that, unless you could find a different technology entirely. But you probably could get to 97% recycled plastic, theoretically. Do you— what would it take to do that? Are you in for that journey? That's kind of a question we're grappling with. And frankly, the pandemic really slowed down progress on some of these things, both in terms of depressed sales, but also in terms of decreased ability to collaborate with an overseas supplier.

Yeah.

So we had some really cool stuff going in innovation. We made really big progress in the first few years of selling LVT, and then the pandemic happened, and it's been start-stop since then. So I think it's led to questioning, especially with the backlash against LVT, to say like, is Are we committed to taking that product over the finish line? Or should we change tracks, bet on a different horse, whatever our mixed metaphor is here?

They all apply. I think that's one of those interesting points too, where when you get, get to that point, you have to— it's not worth it to go halfway. If you're going to invest the money into doing it, you want to know that you're going to take it all the way. You're going to cross the finish line with it. And it is such a, it's that inflection point of, is it worth pursuing that technology still? Or is it worth, should we, for that amount of money, could we, is that actually enough to just go over here and develop a competing one? And good current examples of that is like in the automotive world, you have gas electric, and then Toyota is saying hydrogen, we're betting it on hydrogen. We're going to invest in that. Because we think neither of those horses are going to win the race and we want the third one. And so, and that also helps, like that helps industry too, because we'll find out if Toyota's still doing hydrogen in a decade, probably panning out pretty well. We'll know whether it's a good bet or not.

It's that question of, I always say that if you're really in it to win it on sustainability, you actually are pursuing sustainability the way Ray Anderson talked about it, which is truly getting to the top of the mountain, like this could be sustained over time and would not be stealing from future generations. That's why we actually have it in our brand standard that no one that works at Interface is ever allowed to refer to our company or our product as sustainable because we know better. It's a shorthand and people fall into it, but they use it like, and it's exchangeable for green. Oh, you want to see our greenest product? Oh, here's our sustainable product portfolio. Like, we don't have any sustainable products and we've been working on it for 30 years because You really measure, are we 100% there? We're not.

Yeah. And that kind of loops us back to the beginning like this. It's a process where I think we'll be, we will eventually, right, cross the, okay, we're sustainable. Right. But I think there's going to be this zone where, and maybe you guys will be one of the first companies that really goes into this space, takes into regenerative. And we'll have enough regenerative to be counteracting everybody who hasn't crossed into sustainable yet. We'll still have this kind of rainbow of where people are at, but we'll, on average, we'll be sustainable as a planet, we'll say. But you guys might be way far ahead, and then we still have people trailing, and it's going to take time. And obviously we want to get to that sustainable. point as quickly as possible, but then it's going to still be more before we really cross into an overall true— if we're talking about globally and you're in the global market, changing the global market, we want to globally have an average of regenerative. That's a lot, a lot of regenerative work being done.

And if you look at how— I mean, the thing that people don't understand about sustainability is it's not It can only happen at the system level. There's no, there's really no such thing as a sustainable product because a product is just a flow in a system.

Yeah.

So the only place where sustainability can occur is at a system level. And so if you look at that, and if you look at how sustainability works in systems, it's not that there isn't any degradation, it's that the renewal at least matches the degradation.

Right.

So if you look at the idea that companies are all going to be sustainable by being That's not really, if you look at the only sustainable systems we know, which are natural systems, there's always withdrawals and deposits of resources. There's always renewal. There's always breakdown. Not every company's going to be neutral. And so a lot of companies need to be restorative or regenerative, whatever your favorite word is.

Right.

And so that's what we have to be looking toward is how do we make substantial parts of the economy actually pull a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere. Exactly. Because we're not going to stop putting any carbon into the atmosphere, not anytime soon. No, no, no, not really. And even natural systems put in a lot of carbon dioxide. It's just that they've traditionally taken out similar amounts.

Well, I think, and this is where like people, this whole concept, and I've put it, I've been to DC to talk to people about this, is just like the concept Getting people to understand the sustainable, we really have to step back. And it's a good point, like products in and of themselves are not, they're not sustainable and they're not unsustainable. They are actually part of a loop. And the concept of a circular economy is really one of those things that clicked for me. Like, this is the way it is, right? Everything has a— Everything's in a circle. Everything's in a process no matter what. And, but it's really hard to get people to step back enough to see that it is. And we don't really think about that. We're focused on, oh, can this be recycled? Like, yes. And the thing is, most—

One of my favorite claims, sort of recyclable for a product, it was like, that is so dependent on a whole system around it that it's like, it almost can't exist at a product level.

You can design something, you can be thinking about it.

Design it to fit a system.

Yeah. And you can imagine what you think the system is if you don't have anything else. But yeah, you know, and that's— I've been in conversations about, you know, how do you design for sustainability? And a lot of it comes down to if you just have the designers talking over here, they have their own ideas. But then as soon as you bring in a recycling company and they go, yes, theoretically the material is, but it takes me 6 hours to take this apart. It's not worth it. Oh, and you've overmolded and you've mixed material. Like, now I can't do anything with that.

Yeah, it's theoretically recyclable. We would never do it, which I always think is funny. Yeah, I mean, it's not funny, but it is just the reality. And I've been grappling with this since even before I got into the carpet world, but been grappling a lot with carpet, which is one of those things where there are recycling systems for carpet, but carpet is definitely not designed for recyclability according to any of the normal standards. I sometimes call it a demon layer cake of different plastics. If you hypothetically look at like, oh, we want to design so that we can take apart these plastics and recycle them separately, that's normally how we recycle plastics. The plastics are bonded together as tightly as possible. Because if they come apart, the layers of your carpet come apart, that is a manufacturing defect called delamination.

Right.

Designed specifically to avoid that. So your quality metrics for design are completely contrary to what your traditional circularity metrics are, which would be, how do we isolate these specific plastics and recycle them each in their own stream? You end up having to redesign the recycling machinery or the manufacturing process to either be really good at separating a complex waste stream, and you need specialized machines for that, or to redesign the manufacturing process to accommodate an incredibly impure input. That's mixed plastics.

Right.

Which is more what we've done. Like, we can, we can put a certain amount of ground-up mixed plastic from our carpet tile back into the backing of a new carpet tile. Now, I would say arguably our— the bigger win in our supply chain has been on the nylon side. That's the part you walk on, incredibly durable, thin film that makes carpet fluffy but still durable. It's a filament that our biggest supplier, Aquafil, has cracked the code on how to take relatively mixed plastics. So they have to do a certain amount of sorting and isolate it down to create a pure depolymerized You know, indistinguishable from virgin nylon, 100% recycled new fiber. And that's our standard fiber. But that's more of the old tradition of how do we isolate the single, in this case, most valuable polymer, the nylon, with a set of technology investments.

Got it.

And so they've really made a lot of great progress there. And really grateful, I think, at this point that we took that journey together because it started out in the late '90s where we went to all the nylon suppliers and said, well, we figured out that the number one sort of environmental impact for our product is the nylon. What can you do about that? Can we get recycled nylon? And they all said, well, that's both economically and technologically impossible.

Well, here we are now.

And we were on a mission. And so we said, well, whoever figures it out will get all our business. And we rigorously rewarded the fiber company that came up with the most recycled content year after year, gave them all the new collections. Okay, you got 2%. That turns out to be the state of the art this year. You get all the new business. 5%, you get all the new business. 15%. And about 13 years later, Aquaphyll hit 100% and it got most of our business. Wow.

That's still impressive, right? I mean, there's a lot of, a lot of materials we can't do that yet with, but getting 100% recycled out of mixed, Even if it's just nylon, yeah, I know we're losing plastic on the way, but that's still a massive, massive win to be able to do that. Because I know there's— I was just talking to another conference, somebody in the automotive world, the headlamp, right? The headlamp has— because it's all fused together, it's at the front of the car, it gets beat by weather constantly, also made to never come apart. And they finally are working with There's a couple companies that are doing some sort of chemical dissolve and separate, but they're still— and they're like pouring money into it. They're working with them very closely. No idea how long they've been doing it, but they're still 5 to 10 years out for, you know, they can do it in a lab, but doing it in a lab is different than I'm going to recycle 100 million headlamps a year and produce a product that I can ship you in the barrels to use again for new plastic. That is a long ways off still. So it's, uh, I feel like 13 years is not too bad. That's actually, that's right about on track for—

It is interesting because it, you know, when you know the, the more details you know of these stories, the more, I don't know, to me the more interesting it is. But it also becomes— Aquaphil was a European supplier to us in the late '90s, and they wanted to move into North America. Which was a much bigger business for us and for everyone else that makes carpet. So they said, "Wow, if we can get crack the code on this recycling thing, we'll get interface as a big customer and be able to move into the North American market." And they did. They moved into Asia with us as well. So they had a business strategy tied to technology development around recycling, and I think it's gone pretty well for them based on the fact that they went public and they're selling to all the fashion brands now. There's Hundreds of apparel companies want that yarn too.

Well, I mean, nylon is used in so many things. It's used obviously with carpet. It's in everything. We put— so 100% recycled material, it has been the holy grail for such a long time. It's great for them. That's great that they cracked that code and you guys are able to tap into it and other people get to use the material too.

Yeah. And, you know, we have competitors that use it in carpet, but there's, like I said, it's also any nylon garment. Occasionally I'll run into someone, I'll tell them that story, and then they'll realize they're wearing one of them.

That's awesome.

Stella McCartney jacket, some fancy designer. And we're like, we look at the tag, 100% recycled nylon. I'm like, yeah, that's our fiber.

Amazing.

Now sold in very high-end fashion, but it was invented for some carpet company you've never heard of. Right.

You definitely walked on our carpet tiles and never knew.

But to me, that's the best story because it's how we change the world. If we can change the materials palette that's available to any designer, which is something that, you know, in this case, 90% lower carbon footprint than standard nylon made from crude oil. That's a huge improvement. It's available at scale. It comes in all the colors. It's very high performance. There's no trade-off. It is a little more expensive, but not a lot.

But when you're, I mean, I think that comes down to kind of what we talked about earlier, right? If it's a big expense jump, that, that's hard, right? We all have bottom lines, individuals and companies, right? We all have a bottom line. But if you can get close, people do want to do the right thing. They want to pick it. And so if you're talking about just a small jump, then there's the value add and you can justify, justify something Like that. So yeah, I mean, it is impressive. I really, really appreciate your, just your honesty, right? As a brand of being, we're on a journey. This is what we're doing. This is where we're at. We're not afraid to tell you we're not 100% sustainable yet. And, but you've been able to make such massive changes and improvements and material is now available due to you guys, you guys helping fund and incentivize these changes that are impacting other industries. And I think that's where we don't— all of us, we don't know. I'm sure when you guys set out with that requirement, like, we want to— we'll give it out to whoever figures it out, you probably weren't thinking about fashion. You probably weren't, right? Those were all unintended, very positive impacts that, that you guys have made because you've really focused on, we want to make the whole system sustainable, where this is our goal, right?

Well, and that was also—

set that goal, that set out that goal, and you guys have been trudging along making that happen.

It's also something I, you know, I like to call every company has an elephant in the room on sustainability. What's the single biggest? And, and to the degree to which you don't grapple with that, you're not really doing anything but lip service on sustainability. Now, it isn't necessarily easy to solve. A lot of times it's deeply embedded in systems way bigger than you. You know, if you're a travel company, jet fuel, that's this huge— but that's the elephant in the room. And until you— if you want to be a sustainable travel company, you have to have some thinking and some long-term strategy on how do we address that elephant, because otherwise you're just faking it. Our elephant in the room was that all of our products were made from fossil fuels, from fossil inputs.

Right.

And until we could shift that, even if people told us it was impossible, We aren't going to get there. And so you could say, ah, well, they told us nylon's impossible, so we'll just tweak all the other parts of the product and then keep looking over at that elephant periodically.

Right.

Because literally, when we crunched the numbers, it was 70% of the footprint of our product was making nylon from crude oil. And until you move, until you address that elephant, you're not really going to get anywhere near your sustainability goals.

Not if you're honest with yourself.

If you're willing to take that on, then you have to start asking for the impossible. And, and, you know, in this situation, we got some amazing partners step forward and invested a lot of money. Some of their stories about trying to get loans for their first big recycling machine were pretty funny. They're like, you want to base your whole business on trash? Like, we're never giving you money for that.

Oh man.

Fortunately, the markets have changed. I mean, there's so much more capital available for some of these sustainability things than there ever was before, which is really great. But some of these pioneers deserve due credit.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I feel like we could talk forever. This has been really great. This has been informative. I love hearing about all this massive impact that you guys have made. To wrap up though, I wanted to ask for anybody that wants to learn more about what you guys are doing, your sustainability, partner with you guys in any way, what's— and we'll have, we'll have everything on the show notes, but is there a preferred, better way, best way to reach out and connect with you guys?

There's a couple things I'll recommend. If you want to know more about sort of the journey and the history, there's an independent filmmaker made a movie about us, which I definitely recommend. It's won some awards. And but beyondzerofilm.com, you can find out about Okay. Basically the interface story of starting from this early epiphany to— it takes you up to about 5 years ago. So it's not exactly up to the modern day.

But close.

Very well done. I know I'm biased, but it's a good story. And it's really, it's the story about transformation of an industrial company and covering a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. It's not just one big advertisement. So makes for interesting viewing. You can see it on Delta and a few other airlines now, which is probably the best distribution they've gotten. Okay, interesting. The feedback they got from folks like, I don't know if it was Netflix or one of the other people, they're like, corporation as a good guy isn't really a genre.

Okay, that is, they do.

Maybe it should be, but I see your point. Okay, corporation as bad guy, definitely a genre, right?

Yes, that we can sell.

So it's a bit of a different thing. So that's for the history. Just questions in general, sustainability@interface.com. That's a good place to start. It'll get to more We have a team worldwide that do a version of what I do, which is try to be embedded in whatever market they're in and drive sustainability on that one. And so that's fun. Someone has a more regional question like, what are you doing in Northern Europe or something? I can send you to Janneke or one of our other people who knows that market and knows what the levers we're pulling in that market are. But start with sustainabilityinterface.com.

Okay.

And on the embodied carbon side, Building Transparency is one of our big NGO partners, buildingtransparency.org. Trying to work with governments and procurement bodies all over the world to be able to find building products with lower embodied carbon and to try to make it as easy as possible. In some cases, they're under the hood of another tool that might be like a little more attractive, but we'll feed all the data in from Building Transparency. We have all the EPD data from all these different categories of building products.

Okay.

So that you don't have to read them. We'll read them and then feed it into your favorite sexy tool. Where it'll automatically find you the low footprint product that comes in the color you want. So that's kind of the vision and very important work. Literally, Building Transparency staff helped inform the writing of the Inflation Reduction Act. They're in the mix on all of these big movements on embodied carbon, especially in the US, but also Canada, starting to do more in Europe and Asia as well.

Amazing. Well, and we'll, for everyone listening and watching, we'll have those links in the show notes for everyone. And yeah, thanks for taking time out of your day, making the market a better place to chat with us. Thanks.

Yep. Yep. Look forward to anything we can do to help you get the word out, because I think it's so important for designers really to get this, because I think fundamentally what we're talking about is system design and people who already understand design have a leg up on doing this work. So it's that much more important to think about the world from a design perspective, like, hey, let's design a climate we actually want. You know, that's a design challenge. Yeah.

Think about that. What would it be if we actually designed the whole thing? So perfect.

Thank you.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.