Harnessing Methane, Cutting Waste, Recycling Tiles

The urge to conserve is obvious at the Interface Corporation, from slogans painted on the factory floor (“One Planet/Zero Harm”), to prize parking spots reserved for car-poolers, to packing boxes so relentlessly recycled that they sit, wrinkled and battered, festooned with the remains of previously applied masking tape (bought from Germany, because the extra adhesive in American masking tape causes more wear and tear).

Less obvious is the way the company now looks at all of its processes, from the time designers think of a new pattern until customers return their worn-out carpet for recycling.

For example, when the company decided in 2000 to introduce a new line of carpet tiles, designers began by asking, “How would nature make a floor?” They thought of forests, where the ground is covered by pebbles, leaves, twigs, soil. “What they discovered was everything is random, it’s never the same, and it’s always beautiful,” said Stuart Jones, vice president of sustainable development for Interface Research and Development.

This biomimicry produced Entropy, now one of Interface’s hottest patterns. Its randomness allows it to be applied any-which-way and tremendously reduces the amount of finished tiles that must be rejected as “off-quality.”

The nylon cloth facing for Entropy, and other patterns, is made a few miles from here, in another Interface plant at West Point. An engineer there figured out that running the tufting machines with many relatively small creels of fiber, rather than fewer large creels, would greatly reduce waste — “about $180,000 worth of first-quality nylon” annually, Mr. Jones said.

more from the NY Times