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.