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    TED

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    Princess Jullyn Claudio
    Erin Meezan discusses how her company Interface looks to nature for inspiration on sustainability. Interface asked how nature would design a floor and learned from geckos' feet to create an adhesive-free carpet tile. By mimicking how nature harvests rainwater and stores carbon, Interface's factories now have a positive environmental impact. Interface hopes sharing its sustainability work will encourage collaboration between companies to collectively address climate change at larger scales.

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    TED

    Uploaded by

    Princess Jullyn Claudio
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    Erin Meezan discusses how her company Interface looks to nature for inspiration on sustainability. Interface asked how nature would design a floor and learned from geckos' feet to create an adhesive-free carpet tile. By mimicking how nature harvests rainwater and stores carbon, Interface's factories now have a positive environmental impact. Interface hopes sharing its sustainability work will encourage collaboration between companies to collectively address climate change at larger scales.

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    Erin Meezan discusses how her company Interface looks to nature for inspiration on sustainability. Interface asked how nature would design a floor and learned from geckos' feet to create an adhesive-free carpet tile. By mimicking how nature harvests rainwater and stores carbon, Interface's factories now have a positive environmental impact. Interface hopes sharing its sustainability work will encourage collaboration between companies to collectively address climate change at larger scales.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    12 views1 page

    TED

    Uploaded by

    Princess Jullyn Claudio
    Erin Meezan discusses how her company Interface looks to nature for inspiration on sustainability. Interface asked how nature would design a floor and learned from geckos' feet to create an adhesive-free carpet tile. By mimicking how nature harvests rainwater and stores carbon, Interface's factories now have a positive environmental impact. Interface hopes sharing its sustainability work will encourage collaboration between companies to collectively address climate change at larger scales.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 1

    Director: Alright, whenever you’re ready.

    Erin Meezan: There's so much debate right now about what companies and countries
    should be doing on climate. Nature is actually the best benchmark. Why don't we just
    follow what it would do? Nature has 3.8 billion years of R and D under its belt. So, you
    know, there's certainly something nature has that maybe humans always don't. Nature
    can do complex chemistry, really interesting engineering. And so how can we look to
    nature and really harness what we know works to provide solutions for business to be
    more sustainable?

    [In the Green: The Business of Climate Action]


    [Presented by: TED Countdown and The Climate Pledge]
    [Erin Meezan; Company: Interface; Sector: Manufacturing; Location: USA]

    This is a carpet tile that we make. We operate in the building and construction space,
    which is close to 40 percent of global carbon emissions. So in that space, we’re putting
    a lot of materials, like flooring, into buildings. When we started on sustainability as a
    company, most of these products had a significant impact on the planet. We wasted a lot
    of resources, we recycled nothing, and they had a carbon footprint that we had never even
    measured or understood. Interface became inspired to take the company in a more
    sustainable direction. We took our product design team out in the forest and asked: How
    would nature design a floor? What lessons could nature give us about moving away from
    adhesives in our business? And that led to an exploration of gecko's feet that allowed us
    to design an innovation that took the company off glue and really helped us build a whole
    new business by being inspired by nature. We did things to reduce waste. We've swapped
    out less sustainable materials for recycled and bio-based materials. And so over 20 years,
    we've been able to innovate and create something that actually stores more carbon than
    it emits, has a net benefit to the environment. We really challenged ourselves to say,
    what's beyond that? Could we create a factory that has a positive impact, and what might
    that look like? Nature, for example, harvests and collects and purifies rainwater. So what
    we've done in some of our factory locations is install rainwater collection devices to be
    able to take that rainwater out, use that in our manufacturing operations. Nature stores
    carbon. And so we have opportunities onsite through planting, possibly removal of
    parking lots, possibly by establishing green roofs, to store carbon on-site and in the
    buildings within our company. And I'm really excited now that it's not just Interface trying
    to figure this out. Other companies started to hear us talking about it and got really
    interested in it. We could share the work that we had done, and other companies could
    accelerate their learning, but also they committed to share what they were doing. And
    we're hopeful that this will continue to pick up momentum. I think the question for
    everybody is: What’s your carbon-negative carpet tile? It goes from the idea of a
    sustainable carpet tile to a sustainable building to a sustainable city. If we're going to
    meaningfully address global warming, we have to imagine not just these products alone,
    but the collective effort of what we can do together to have a positive impact on the
    environment.

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