In episode 10, we welcome special guest Connie Hensler, Global Director of Environmental Management and Product Stewardship at global flooring manufacturer Interface. A long-term and passionate advocate of a more sustainable approach to design and manufacturing, Connie joins Neil, Jim and Shelley to discuss how to break traditional product development thinking with moonshot goals, all while achieving financial - and sustainable - success.

In this Episode

Shelley - For the sake of our listeners who may not know much about Interface, can you describe what Interface manufactures and its history with sustainability, because it's got a bit of a unique history. [00:34 ]

• Connie - Interface is a global flooring manufacturer. We make modular flooring, like carpet tiles, resilient and rubber flooring and we're a mid sized company with annual sales of just over a billion dollars. We're headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, but we have manufacturing sites in many countries across Europe and the Asia Pacific region. But we aren't really known for our flooring as much as we are known for our design and sustainability leadership. We're more of a sustainability company who happens to make flooring. That's the perception of us in the marketplace, I think. [00:47 ]


• Neil - But you do it well, and that's the point at the end, right?


• Connie - We were lucky to be put on a mission many years ago, back in 1994, when our founder, Ray Anderson, had his environmental epiphany about the damage that the company does to the environment. And he really turned the entire company's mission towards eliminating that environmental impact. Of course, we still have to make flooring and we have to make money to support that sustainability habit, but that's really where all of our focus is and has been since 1994.

Neil - Do you remember how big of a company you were back in 1994? [01:54 ]

• Connie - I don't remember the exact figure. We were certainly a lot smaller than we are today. We have acquired a lot of companies and we have had organic growth. Back in 1994, carpet tile was our only flooring. We didn't have the other businesses. And carpet tile was just in its infancy. Most carpet wasn't modular back then. It was broad loom and so it's been a real revolution in the flooring industry to move from, you know, giant rolls of flooring down to the modular concept, which is so much more sustainable. So we've grown a lot since 1994.


• Neil - The reason I asked is flooring has been around for a long time. The kind of flooring has changed and as you described, the products have evolved over time, but it's not nuclear fusion, it is not artificial intelligence; these kinds of themes that everybody focuses on. It's quite unique to find something that makes you stand out and it's not often that a company finds it. It seems you guys banked on being the most sustainable company of your kind. Would that be fair to say?


• Connie - Oh, yeah, definitely. We just did it so early in the game before anybody else was doing it. I think that's what really made us originally stand out.

Neil - So how did it start? [03:21 ]

• Connie - That was so long ago. We began with Mission Zero - our goal to eliminate all of our environmental impact. And it wasn't just a top-down initiative, it was driven by the chairman CEO of the company, which is immeasurable in the impact that can provide. But it was also a groundswell on the factory floor because we engaged all employees in it. Because let's face it, anybody who's in the company who's doing anything, whether you're answering the phone or running a tufting machine, you are contributing to the environmental impact. So how can everybody contribute to reducing or eliminating that impact? And instead of coming to work to help the company make money, you were coming to work to save the world. Everybody was inspired. And you got such great employee energy in that.

Jim - A lot of the interaction we've had with companies in the past is top down. Even the employees are 100% behind it. There's often like a middle manager that begins to stand in the way. Did you have the same belief in action by the middle managers as you did from the top down? And the factory floor? [04:19 ]

• Connie - Probably the middle management is always the last to adopt the change. But having the drive from the top, it became part of their KPI's and the managers get on board or get off the train. And they tied all the performance and bonus schedules to it. If you wanted to earn your bonus, you better be meeting your environmental targets. So that helped a lot too.

Neil - Sustainability has been around for a while; the good part of about 40 years. But when I talk to product managers and engineers, many of them do not know what it is. And these are highly educated people that are focusing on creating products that are typically very technical that require trade off analysis and stuff like that. How did you end up translating the ambitions of being more sustainable to the entry level or the shop floor employees and what they had to do on a daily basis? [05:05 ]

• Connie - You know, it's all about the metrics. It had to be measurable, and then you had to be able to score against the goal. So, we got way deep in the details of, there must have been, I mean, there were spreadsheets and spreadsheets of all the different parts of the business that we were measuring, all the different pieces from scrap rates on every single machine. How are we going to reduce this waste? Because, you know, a huge part of our impact is always waste and efficiencies. So, everybody had a scorecard. There were posters in the plant, daily updated with progress. You'd see that a lot in quality, maybe you see that kind of charts and graphs posted about daily quality accomplishments. We had had quality too, but in addition ours were tied to the environmental goals. And the metrics were so fine that you could see, not daily, but probably weekly performance.

Neil - If I'm reading you correctly, you translated, or someone translated that we want to reduce waste. This is something easy compared to the steps to translating reducing carbon impact to the shop floor. If you just had a waste impact and you said, reduce the weight of the bag of scrap, at the end of the day, this is much easier. So how low did you have to go to operationalize this? [06:41 ]

• Connie - When we started, we weren't doing life cycle assessment. We just had a list of things that we knew we needed to reduce - non renewable energy, virgin raw materials, waste factors. We just had this long list of things we thought were relevant to environmental impact. But then in 2000, we adopted the use of lifecycle assessment for our metrics. And of course, we weren't just focused on carbon. For many years, we were focused on all the different impact categories. But then eventually, ten years in, we started focusing on carbon. So anyway, because we do life cycle assessment on all the thousands of products that we make, you can drill down to the shop floor and say, if you decrease the trim waste by this much, it reduces the carbon footprint by this much. We had to be using lifecycle assessment before we were able to do that. Before that, you could only tie it to cost because financial accounting was all we had at the time.

Neil - Was there any epiphany that came out of using lifecycle assessments that you did not have before? [08:14 ]

• Connie - When we started we were just a carpet company. The chemistry and the formulation work that we did internally was focused on the backing, which is the mass of the carpet for modular carpet. It has a real structured back for dimensional stability and installation. And that's where our expertise was. We were good at that, and we understood that very well. So, we assumed that's what we should be working on. But we did life cycle assessment and suddenly we realized that's one of the least impactful parts of our product. The nylon yarn on the top, the energy inputs and the waste factors were what was driving. So LCA was very helpful. Unfortunately, it showed us that we had to work on stuff that we didn't have as much control over, but it's what we needed to be working on.

Shelley - There's this other aspect of mission zero that I think would be interesting to look at, and I've heard you mention before that traditional solutions tend to be incremental, and Interface didn't do that. Instead, it set a target to eliminate its environmental impact and called that mission zero. How did not choosing an incremental target change the problem you were trying to solve? [09:12 ]

• Connie - Traditional product development tends to be improve a product characteristic or maybe add a feature, and you just kind of assume that there's an added goal of improved sustainability, and that leads to, or maybe there is a specific improvement dictated by the product brief, and that usually leads to incremental changes and incremental improvements. It's just the normal way of doing product development. But when the product development goal is to have zero negative environmental impact, you have to rethink the who