Our great task is to bring man in scale again with the entire horizon of nature, so that he can sense it in all its wealth and promises, harmonies and mysteries. In ignorance and pride and by insecurity, we have severed ourselves from our broader background.
— György Kepes1
As the members of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee drifted out of a meeting in Vancouver to plan an anti-nuclear protest voyage, one of them raised his fingers in a peace sign. ‘Make it a green peace,’ said another.2 The phrase seemed so apt that they chose it as the name of the boat. An activist’s son offered to design ‘Green Peace’ badges to be sold to raise money for the voyage, but as he could not squeeze both words on to them, he merged them into one – ‘Greenpeace’.
Not only did the protest boat set sail for the US government’s nuclear test site in the Aleutian Islands on 15 September 1971 as the Greenpeace, but the group decided to rechristen itself the Greenpeace Foundation.3 By the late 1970s, ‘green’ had become the default name and symbolic colour for ecological activists all over the world. There were Die Grünen in Germany, Groen! in Belgium, Les Verts in France, and later De Grønne in Denmark, Federazione dei Verdi in Italy, The Greens in Australia, and dozens more. And why not? What could be more fitting as an emblem of environmentalism than green, the colour of nature in many countries, and of paradise in Islamic culture? Except that in the largely man-made world of design, green is often far from natural or paradisiacal.
The problem is that green is an elusive and unstable hue. From the Italian Renaissance to the Romantic movement, artists struggled to mix exact shades of green paint and to reproduce them accurately. Green dyes and pigments proved equally problematic in the industrial age, so much so that toxic substances were often used to stabilize them. Some of the green wallpapers made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contained arsenic, prompting public outrage when people died from deadly fumes as they rotted.4 Even today Pigment Green 7, a common shade of green in plastics and paper, includes chlorine. Another popular hue, Pigment Green 36, contains bromine as well as chlorine; and Pigment Green 50 has traces of cobalt, titanium and nickel. If potentially damaging pigments like those are used to dye plastic green or to produce green ink for printing on to paper, it will be impossible to recycle or compost those products safely lest they contaminate everything else.5
In other words, the colour green, the enduring symbol of ecological purity, is often not very ‘green’ at all. As Kermit the Frog sang on The Muppets, ‘It’s not that easy being green’,6 not least in design. The quest to build a safer, more sustainable society is an exhilarating opportunity for designers to make a positive impact on our lives. For many reasons, ranging from unalloyed altruism to glory seeking, they would be crazy not to grasp it. Yet their efforts to help us to live more responsibly have often been as troubled as the history of green itself.
There can be no doubt about the need to act. Even if they suspect global warming of being a fallacy cooked up by demented conspiracy theorists, no designer – or anyone else – can pretend to ignore the damage wrought by the degradation of the environment. All they need to do is look at a landfill site. It does not need to be one of the bigger ones, like the giant dump at Agbogbloshie in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, where discarded computers are shipped from Europe and North America to be burnt by scavengers, often boys, sent from their homes hundreds of miles away, in the hope of extracting scraps of copper, brass, aluminium or zinc from the debris.7 Any landfill will do, because it is there that designers’ work often goes to die in an ignominious death which can contaminate the land for decades to come.
Imagine landing a plum job with a stellar design team and working long hours, wrestling with the laws of physics to produce a gleaming new digital device, only to see desperate child workers foraging among its charred remains in a hellhole like the Agbogbloshie dump. Surely it would make you wish that you had worked differently. Perhaps by identifying more sophisticated materials and processes which may have made the product safer to dispose of. Or by trying harder to ensure that it could be recycled, rather than ending up somewhere as noxious as that Ghanaian tip, or on a latter-day version of Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York, once the world’s largest landfill site, two and a half times bigger than Central Park and taller than the Statue of Liberty.8
There are two ways of describing the outcome of that prestigious design job. One is that the designer helped to develop alluring and innovative products which people loved to use, and won critical acclaim as well as coveted prizes. Another is that he or she produced something which ended up failing to decompose in a bloated landfill site, or being dismembered in a fetid dump where child workers risked injury, disease and worse in the charred soil.9 Both descriptions would be accurate, and could be applied to the outcome of many other design endeavours.
In Tim Brown’s book Change by Design he describes how an IDEO design team developed a new children’s toothbrush for Oral-B. It sold well, and the kids who used it seemed to like it. But one day the lead designer on the project was walking along a beautiful, deserted beach in Baja California, Mexico, when he spotted something colourful in the sand. It was one of the toothbrushes, which had washed up with the tide.10 Hardly a devastating incident in environmental terms, at least not in isolation, but marine debris is a serious problem. One ‘island’ of floating junk known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or Trash Vortex has emerged in the Pacific Ocean and is twice the size of Texas.11 No designer would like to think of his or her work ending up there, or as a blight on an otherwise unspoilt Mexican beach, and to consider what ecological damage it may have caused on its way.
Feeling outraged is the easy part. Designers generally agree on the principle that protecting the environment is important, and that they should try to help the rest of us to live responsibly, but they are likely to disagree about everything else relating to it. What does sustainability mean in design? What could – and should – it deliver? How can success be judged? Is it permissible to compromise, and if so, in which circumstances and to what degree? All these questions are fiercely disputed with different designers expressing contradictory views, often with equal conviction.
Consider the children’s toothbrush. It was the result of a well-intentioned design exercise and would not generally be considered an environmentally hazardous product. What were the design team’s responsibilities with regard to its ecological consequences? Some designers would argue that their duty would be discharged by producing a toothbrush which does its job so well, and is so robust and appealing, that a child will want to use it for as long as possible, rather than being tempted to throw it away or replace it. After all, they might say, how can a designer be expected to control what happens to a product once it has been sold, or the manufacturer or retailer, come to that? Surely, whoever ends up owning or using the toothbrush should take responsibility for it from then onwards.
Others would dismiss this argument as feeble, or downright irresponsible. Of course, designers must try to make things that last, but longevity, they contend, is not enough on its own. Designers should also strive to ensure that neither they, nor anyone else, need have any qualms about their work from the moment it was conceived until it is disposed of, and that its environmental impact will not simply be neutral, but positive.
What issues does this raise for the toothbrush? Is it made from recycled materials? Can it be recycled itself – safely and economically? How much water was used to manufacture it? And how much energy? Has the manufacturer or retailer provided a user-friendly way of sending the toothbrush for recycling? What about the packaging? Is it made from recycled and recyclable materials, with no toxic inks that might contaminate the groundwater system? Is it as compact as possible, to allow more toothbrushes to be packed into a box, and more boxes into a freight container, thereby minimizing the amount of energy required to ship them from place to place? And what sort of energy is that? Did the designer ensure that all these issues could be tackled cost-effectively to prevent bad practices from creeping back in?
If the ecological implications of designing a relatively straightforward product such as a toothbrush are so tortuous, how much worse will they be for something like a road transport system, which is embedded in labyrinthine networks of different industries, services, political and regulatory bodies, all with their own agendas and vested interests?
The case for redesigning road transport is indisputable, because the status quo is dangerous and dysfunctional. There are already some eight hundred and fifty million cars and trucks worldwide, nearly enough to circle the globe a hundred times if parked bumper to bumper. Most of them are powered by noisy, polluting internal combustion engines, which consume eighteen million barrels of oil and emit over seven million tons of carbon dioxide every day. The roads are so congested in many cities that average speeds are less than ten miles per hour. Over a million people worldwide are killed in road accidents each year, and many more are injured.12 Yet the number of vehicles is still increasing: by two thousand a day in Beijing alone, as its citizens replace their bicycles with cars and trucks, at the same time as other cities are striving to foster the type of cycling culture that China is forsaking.
The first step is for the automotive industry to make a different type of car, by replacing mechanically controlled vehicles powered by internal combustion engines with electronically controlled ones fuelled by renewable energy. Technologically there is nothing to stop it from doing so, and the industry is moving in that direction, albeit slowly, and so far without having produced a car whose design is so compelling that it will transform the market as the Ford Model T did in the early 1900s, and the iPod has done for digital music and the Kindle for electronic books. Even if such a vehicle is finally developed, redesigning the car will not be enough on its own to make road transport safe and sustainable, because every other aspect of the system needs to be redesigned too.
As the number of energy-efficient cars increases, so will the demand for facilities where their batteries can be recharged or they can be refuelled with renewable forms of energy such as hydrogen. One option is to convert existing petrol stations for the purpose. Another is to adapt electronic street fixtures like phone kiosks, street lights and parking meters, as the Spanish government has done in Barcelona, Madrid and Seville.13 It might also be possible to reduce congestion by introducing dynamic pricing systems for recharging and refuelling, and for parking tariffs too. Knowing that all those things will cost less when the roads are quietest could encourage drivers to use their vehicles then, rather than at busier times.
Then there is the design of the roads. Designating special lanes for bicycles and buses, or dedicated cycle superhighways, like those in Copenhagen, can help traffic to flow more efficiently.14 Doing the same for energy-efficient cars may have a similar effect, while making those vehicles more attractive to motorists than wasteful gas-guzzlers. The flow of traffic might also benefit from replacing traffic lights with roundabouts, which often prove more effective at preventing accidents and unnecessary delays.15 The design of any remaining traffic lights could be improved too. The most impressive ones I have seen were in the Chinese city of Tianjin. They consisted of rectangular strips of energy-efficient light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which alternated between red, amber and green. At the start of each signal, the strip was fully illuminated. It then shrank in size, enabling drivers to estimate how long it would be before the signal changed, making them less likely to stress over possible delays, or to be panicked into braking or accelerating at the wrong moments. Finally, to help colour-blind motorists, many of whom see red, amber and green as similar shades of grey, the green signal shrank down towards the bottom of the panel to tell them to ‘go’, and the red shrank upwards for ‘stop’.
The logistics of driving also need to be redesigned. In their book Reinventing the Automobile, William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns proposed the development of the ‘Mobility Internet’, which would enable cars wirelessly to source and exchange information on driving conditions and anything else that might affect the journey.16 The system could alert the vehicle and its driver to bad weather, traffic jams, accidents and sudden obstacles such as a fallen tree, or a chemical spillage from an overturned truck. The car would then be able to switch to a more efficient route before reaching the congested area and getting stuck there. The same technology could enable vehicles to anticipate and avoid collisions, as well as guiding cars along the road while the drivers were working, surfing the Web or resting. Such a system would be a boon to people with disabilities which might otherwise deter them from driving, and for frail elderly motorists. Scary though it sounds to allow a car to drive itself, we are already accustomed to riding in driverless trains and to flying in aircraft that land automatically. Driverless cars, like Google’s, may well be safer by saving motorists and pedestrians from the danger posed by drivers who are drunk, and by those that fall asleep or allow their attention to wander.17
Design also has an important part to play in halting the growth of car ownership. Some of the most interesting exercises in design thinking have been the development of vehicle-sharing schemes, like Zipcar, and online services that enable people to check whether it will be possible to share a journey with another driver who is planning to take a similar route at the same time. Equally innovative are urban cycle-hire systems, such as Vélib’ in Paris and Ecobici in Mexico City, which have had some success at encouraging people to switch to cleaner, healthier forms of transport.18
Curbing car ownership is a challenge all over the world, but is particularly urgent in rapidly expanding economies in Asia and Africa, where ‘Smeed’s law’ has struck. Coined by the British statistician R. J. Smeed in 1949, Smeed’s law suggests that whenever the number of new vehicles increases, so does the risk of accidents for their ingénu drivers. The newly built highways in Ghana are flanked by signs announcing the number of fatalities on those stretches of road and warning drivers to slow down. Yet there is still a powerful political attachment to car ownership as a symbol of economic virility in Ghana, and in other developing countries. A few years ago, I travelled along a recently completed Chinese motorway heading south of Beijing to Tianjin. It was lined by empty billboard hoardings, erected in the confident expectation that they would eventually be filled with advertisements. The motorway also sported the concrete skeletons of flyovers which were not yet connected to roads. They too had been constructed on the assumption that ring roads would be needed once Beijing and Tianjin sprawled outwards into new suburbs. By building the flyovers so far in advance, the Chinese authorities could avoid having to stop the motorway traffic during construction. Clearly, they expected the growth in car ownership to continue, and had invested accordingly, despite the rising toll of road deaths and pollution.
Think of all the people and organizations with some sort of financial, personal or political interest in all those issues. What a minefield to navigate in order to design a sustainable alternative to the dysfunctional status quo. And travelling by car is only one aspect of daily life which needs to be radically reconfigured if it is to be made sustainable. All the others will prove equally arduous, not least as the science of sustainability is so contentious, with acrimonious rows over many issues. I once attended a debate on marine biodiversity at a World Economic Forum conference, and arrived expecting to find the assembled scientists and environmentalists united in a common cause and determined to capitalize on its new-found prominence. Instead, they spent hours bickering about an academic squabble dating back to the early 1990s. No progress was made on that issue or any others that day. Intervening constructively in such combative territory is difficult for any discipline, including design. None of which means that designers should not try to tackle such challenges at a time when the environmental crisis is deepening and, on a positive note, consumers’ expectations of sustainability are increasing and the practice of environmentally responsible design is gradually becoming less onerous.
One encouraging development is the cultural shift within the design community and in external perceptions of design. Traditionally, design was a dirty word to many environmentalists, who were prone to dismissing designers as the evil accomplices of ruthless capitalists in the despoliation of the ecosystem. Unfair though this was in some respects, it was not entirely untrue, not least as the commercial design industry proved so adept at concocting new ways of persuading people to buy more stuff, regardless of whether they needed it or were likely to want it for very long. Since the Industrial Revolution, the design profession has been steeped in consumerism and in believing that innovation is a force for good and that the new will invariably be better than the old. The memoirs of many twentieth-century designers are replete with references to design’s power as a sales tool, but lack any acknowledgement of their social or environmental responsibilities. Raymond Loewy was not alone in believing that the goal of every industrial designer should be to keep ‘his client in the black’.19 Even the more thoughtful Henry Dreyfuss wrote: ‘If people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient – or just plain happier – by contact with the product then the designer has succeeded.’20
It is difficult to imagine any designer, even a global warming sceptic, using language like Loewy’s today, at least not without lacing it with references to design’s moral obligations. And rather than expecting to be applauded for producing something new, designers now anticipate having to justify doing so, and being challenged to defend other aspects of the ecological impact of their work.
There has also been a revision of design history. Buckminster Fuller is now regarded not just as an endearingly eccentric maverick, but as a gifted visionary, who anticipated many of design’s current concerns; while the work of more conventional designers from the past has been reinterpreted to highlight its sustainable qualities.21 For decades, the circular birchwood stool Model No. 60 designed in the early 1930s by Finnair’s tardy celebrity passenger, Alvar Aalto, has been prized for its aesthetic merits as an exemplar of Scandinavian modernism.22 The stool is still seen in that light but is also hailed as an early model of sustainability and locavorism, having always been made in exactly the same way by Artek, the furniture maker founded by Aalto, in the same factory, from the wood of silver birch trees grown in the same nearby forest. If a leg breaks, it should be possible to replace it with one from any other stool, regardless of when it was made. Similarly, one of Aalto’s contemporaries, the Dutch designer and architect Thomas Gerrit Rietveld, has long been admired for the clarity with which he translated the geometric aesthetic of the De Stijl movement into objects like his wooden Red/Blue Chair. Now he is also praised for the use of found materials in the Crate Chair, which he made from the rough planks of spruce wood used in packing crates.23
Unlike Bucky, neither Aalto nor Rietveld styled himself as a sustainable pioneer. But as awareness of ecological issues grew in the second half of the twentieth century, spurred by the publication of books such as Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac in 1949 and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, a new cadre of designers emerged who were dedicated to environmental concerns.24 An alternative design community emerged in northern California at the turn of the 1970s, when designer-makers moved there to live alongside fellow hippies in the redwood forests. Among them was James Blain Blunk, known as J.B., a physicist turned potter, who carved entire chairs and benches from enormous chunks of redwood and cypress found near his home beside a nature reserve in Inverness.25 By the mid 1970s, the German design theorist Jochen Gros had left his job as a design engineer for Siemens to teach at the design school in Offenbach, where he founded Des-in, a group of design activists who experimented with the use of recycled materials and new forms of sustainable production.26
Another escapee from commercial design to academia, Victor Papanek, introduced the principles of ethically and environmentally responsible design to a wider audience in his 1970 book, Design for the Real World. Having grown up in the ‘Red Vienna’ that hatched the Isotype project, he fled Austria with his family when the Nazis gained power, finally settling in the United States. After studying architecture at Frank Lloyd Wright’s school in Taliesin West, Arizona, Papanek worked in commercial design but loathed it, and devoted his working life to championing sustainable design in books, lectures and anthropological research projects conducted while living among the Navajos and Inuit and other indigenous communities. The design establishment detested him, which is hardly surprising, as the opening line of Design for the Real World was: ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.’ By the end of the page, he had also accused them of ‘concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers’, putting ‘murder on a mass-production basis’ and of being ‘a dangerous breed’. Four years after its publication, the British magazine Design described Papanek as being ‘disliked, even loathed by his contemporaries’, and he later complained that they had ‘derided, made fun of, or savagely attacked’ his book.27 But Papanek had the last laugh. By the time the second edition of Design for the Real World appeared in 1985, it had been translated into more than twenty different languages. Still in print today, it is one of the best-selling design books ever published.
In Papanek, Gros, Blunk and Bucky, the sustainable design camp is blessed with gutsy, charismatic idealists as role models, whose contribution to the wider history of design is now given greater acknowledgement. A lively community of websites, blogs, social media groups and professional networks has sprung up to champion their work and that of their successors, including Worldchanging, Inhabitat, Core 77, Good, Treehugger, Change Observer and The Designers Accord. The writing and lectures of the Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau have played an important part in rooting environmentally responsible design within a cultural and political context, as have those of the British design strategist John Thackara and his Italian counterpart Ezio Manzini.28 It has also been championed by the Danish government’s €500,000 INDEX: Design to Improve Life award, and the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in which Bucky’s charitable foundation gives $100,000 a year to a project that, true to his spirit, seeks to ‘solve humanity’s most pressing problems’.29
Such initiatives have fostered a receptive climate for sustainable design ventures, many of which are models of the new approach to design, not only in terms of their ecological objectives, but because they are fired by entrepreneurialism, rooted in digital technology and instinctively combine conventional design techniques with design thinking. As the Herculean challenge of redesigning the road transport system demonstrates, the problems facing sustainable design are so intensely complex, and often strategic and systemic in nature, that they demand the open-mindedness and ingenuity of a fluid, consensual tool like design thinking. Not that it is only of use on a large scale, as its role in smaller enterprises like the Daily Dump waste management programme in Bangalore illustrates.
Daily Dump was developed by the Indian designer Poonam Bir Kasturi as a fun, user-friendly way of encouraging people to recycle domestic waste and to compost it.30 Once, cities exuded perverse pride in disgorging huge quantities of rubbish. The more debris they generated, the more prosperous they were likely to be. One of the most useful, yet least salubrious functions of design has been to find ways of disposing of trash so that the rest of us could forget about it. Now that we can no longer pretend to ignore the damage caused by doing so, getting rid of it responsibly has become a mark of civic sophistication. Very few cities have risen to the challenge, plunging refuse systems into crisis and causing acute problems, especially in the frenzied metropolises of rapidly expanding economies like India’s. Bangalore is typical. It produces more than three thousand tonnes of waste every day and, as the government’s composting plant can only handle five hundred tonnes of it, most of the rest is dumped illegally.31
Having chosen waste management as her cause, Bir Kasturi spent two years researching the best approach, funding the work with her savings. Her goal was to design a convenient way for people to recycle their refuse and to convert organic wet waste into compost. Working with Indian craftsmen, she developed terracotta pots for home composting, and produced a series of larger plastic composting tanks, all developed on an open source basis. She then set up a website to sell them.32 Some people simply buy and use the composters. Others sign up for service packages, which include regular visits by the Daily Dump team to clean and empty the composters, and to do running repairs.33 But Bir Kasturi has been more ambitious for Daily Dump. From the start, she wanted to add educational and entrepreneurial elements to the project, and deployed design thinking to do so. The website provides general information on recycling and composting, as well as about Daily Dump’s products. It also encourages people to comment on the system, and to exchange tips with fellow users. The entrepreneurial opportunities can be as simple as selling compost and composters, or as ambitious as setting up ‘Clones’ of Daily Dump. Anyone wanting to do so registers their intention on the website, before downloading the design specifications of the composters for free. They are then encouraged to share their experience of running a Clone, to alert their peers to possible difficulties, and to flush out suggestions for improvement.34
Equally enterprising is FARM:shop in the Dalston area of east London, where the three founders of the eco-social design group Something & Son have transformed a derelict nineteenth-century terraced house, last used as a women’s refuge, into a laboratory in which they are trying to grow as many different types of food as possible.35 The three founders – Paul Smyth, a design engineer-turned-environmental activist, Andy Merritt, a graphic designer-turned-artist and Sam Henderson, a social scientist-turned-farmer – met while working on ecological projects in London, and hatched the idea for FARM:shop when the local council invited artists and designers to come up with interesting ways of using empty shops.36 They were given a three-year lease and a renovation grant of $10,000. The building was in a dreadful state, with bars on the windows, but a friend tweeted about their plans on day one, and forty volunteers offered to help. After cleaning up the building, Something & Son contacted the manufacturers of the growing technologies they needed to cultivate food there, and worked with them to develop bespoke systems for the space.
Months later, one room on the ground floor had been transformed into an aquaponic farm for tilapia fish and lettuce. It was designed as a self-sustaining ‘closed loop’ system, with the waste from the fish filling the water with nutrients, which nourish the lettuce when the water is pumped into their tanks. The same water is then cleaned by the lettuce before returning to the fish tanks, and back again. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, basil and other plants are cultivated by hydroponic and aeroponic technology in what were once bedrooms. The basement is reserved for mushrooms, and more produce grown in a poly-tunnel in the backyard. Up on the roof, hens strut around a coop, seemingly oblivious to the noise and fumes of the traffic on the busy road outside. People wander in and out of the café in the room next to the aquaponic tanks, where they tuck into the produce grown at FARM:shop, and on an organic farm an hour’s drive away where Henderson is based. There have been crises, such as bugs infesting tomatoes, spider mites attacking luffa sponges, the mushroom crop failing and a power cut that threatened to kill the fish. (As tilapia are Egyptian, they can survive only in heated water. When the power failed, the temperature of the water plummeted, but thankfully the electricity came back on before any damage was done.) Despite these setbacks the experiment worked, and proved that Something & Son could develop a financially sustainable model of growing food in such cramped urban conditions.37
Like Poonam Bir Kasturi, Something & Son have had the freedom to work on their own terms. Other designers who share their objectives may be more constrained. They might work for a commercial design consultancy which has been contracted to advise clients on an ad hoc basis, as IDEO was by Oral-B. Or they could be employed in the corporate design team of a business that gives them little or no influence over many of the decisions which will determine the environmental impact of their work. A sustainable purist would not tolerate such compromises, but not all designers are able or willing to extricate themselves from them – though such constraints may lessen in future as another positive development in sustainable design is the sea change in corporate thinking.
Once regarded as the preserve of hippy entrepreneurs and cranky executives with personal passions for ecology, sustainability is now seen very differently in corporate circles, thanks to the pioneering companies that have proved its financial value. Among them is Interface, the American carpet tile manufacturer, which was not the likeliest of sustainable champions, not least because its founder, Ray Anderson, had no discernible interest in the cause.38 Having established Interface as the world’s biggest company in its field, he was the epitome of an ambitious, profit-oriented American businessman. When his former colleagues had suggested that it might be a mistake to leave a well-paid job in an established carpet company to set up on his own, he rebuffed them with: ‘The hell you say.’ Interface became powerful and profitable in the traditional way by producing carpet tiles with no apparent regard for the ecological consequences. It used lots of petroleum-based materials including nylon, polyester and acrylic, as well as toxic dyes and glues, and its smokestack factories belched dark clouds of pollution up into the sky.39
When a client suggested in the mid 1990s that Interface needed an environmental strategy, Anderson was far from enthusiastic, but he swotted up on the subject by reading The Ecology of Commerce, a book by the environmentalist Paul Hawken. One section of the book describes how twenty-nine reindeer were imported to a US government research station on St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea in Alaska in 1949 to provide an emergency supply of food. The station closed a few years later, leaving the reindeer behind to breed freely. By 1963, there were six thousand of them, but two years later, only forty-two were still alive. The others had starved to death, having stripped the island of vegetation.40 Anderson was deeply moved by the story, which he saw as a metaphor for the self-destructive way that companies like his were depriving the earth of natural resources. He astonished his employees by announcing that Interface was to become what he called a ‘restorative enterprise’, with the aim of having no negative impact on the environment by 2020, producing no greenhouse emissions and no waste. ‘I have to admit I thought he’d gone around the bend,’ said one colleague, Dan Hendrix, who was eventually won round and became chief executive, but Anderson was undeterred.41
Every aspect of Interface was scrutinized to ascertain how it could be made more sustainable. Renewable energy was used wherever possible, and carbohydrate polymers developed to replace petrochemicals in the carpet tiles. Abandoned carpets were recovered from landfill sites for recycling, and customers encouraged to return their old carpets for the same purpose. Quality control was improved to reduce waste. Interface invested heavily in developing the new production technologies required to achieve its objectives, many of which did not exist. Anderson and his team combined conventional approaches to industrial design with design thinking, often doing so instinctively as Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues had done in the vanguard of the first wave of industrialization in the late eighteenth century.
By 2007, twelve years after he had read Hawken’s book, Anderson claimed that the company was halfway up ‘Mount Sustainability’. (He had a soft spot for flowery corporate jargon.) The use of fossil fuels had almost halved, and the factories consumed a third as much water. Some seventy-four tonnes of discarded carpet had been recovered from landfill sites and Interface’s own contribution to landfill was down by eighty per cent. Anderson calculated that the company was saving over $300 million a year from quality improvements, more than enough to pay for the research and development required. Moreover, sales had risen by two-thirds since the start of Mission Zero, and profits had doubled.42 ‘What started out as the right thing to do quickly became the smart thing,’ said Anderson, who took to calling himself ‘a recovering plunderer’43 while insisting that he remained ‘as profit-minded and competitive as anyone you’re likely to meet.’44 By the time he died in 2011, the carbon footprint of Interface’s factories had halved, and he was hailed by the Economist as ‘America’s greenest businessman’.45
Other companies have learnt from Interface’s example that a sustainable business model can produce, as Anderson put it, ‘not just bigger profits, but better, more legitimate ones too’. They have discovered that they too can save money by using water and energy more economically, sourcing materials more responsibly and planning transportation more efficiently. Operating sustainably can also boost their share prices by attracting new investors among the growing number of ethical funds, which only invest in businesses that meet certain environmental and ethical standards. Another advantage is that the corporate goals may inspire existing employees, and help companies to attract talented new recruits, including sought-after graduates, who can take their pick of prospective employers. All compelling reasons for businesses to rethink the way they work, what they produce and how it is designed, and for other organizations to do the same. Not that sustainable design is any less challenging, but the growing confidence in its benefits should foster more models of good practice in future, whether they are corporate giants like Interface, dynamic entrepreneurial enterprises akin to Daily Dump, or cheeky examples of environmental design activism such as FARM:shop.