Ray Anderson built his $1 billion Georgia-based carpet business by, as he describes it, plundering the Earth: using lots of fossil fuels and water, and creating mountains of carpet scraps in landfills.

Now he's got Interface Inc.'s 4,000 employees climbing Mount Sustainability and working on Mission Zero, a multi-faceted goal to make the company environmentally neutral by 2020. Time International magazine recently named Anderson one of its "Heroes of the Environment."

He and former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart also are co-chairing a committee that advises the University of Colorado Denver-based Presidential Climate Action Project, an organization of academic, political and business leaders coming up with 300 ways the next president can combat global warming.

Chief among them is a recommendation to shift federal subsidies from fossil-fuel-using industries to small businesses that are developing renewable forms of energy and other environmentally friendly technologies.

Robert Reiss, radio host of "The CEO Show," recently called Anderson the global corporate leader in pushing businesses to become more environmentally responsible. Interface last year started a consulting business to market its practices to other companies.

Interface officials said 20 percent of the materials the company uses to produce carpets is either from recycled goods or from renewable resources, and Anderson said he would like to push that to 100 percent. Interface also is trying to reduce pollution and waste in other ways, using solar power at a factory in Southern California, for example.

Anderson began taking his company in a new direction, a midcourse correction as he calls it, in 1994, when he was 60.

He was already an innovator. He started Interface in 1973 after seeing carpet tiles in England. He brought the concept to this country, where he revolutionized floor coverings for offices, airports and schools.

Interface tiles are about 20 inches by 20 inches. They can be mailed to customers for do-it-yourself installation. If there's a spill or the tiles are stained for other reasons, it's an easier fix than replacing an entire carpet. Just pull up the tile and wash it off in the sink. If that doesn't work, replace the piece.

"I fell in love with the idea. It just made so much sense," said Anderson, now 73.

For the last five years, Interface has been slicing into the $11 billion U.S. residential carpet market. Interface's hip Flor carpet tile product is popular among condo dwellers and receives high marks from environmentalists because it can be recycled. And Flor recently teamed up with the Martha Stewart brand to reach an even wider audience.

The company's first showroom opened in 2004 in Midtown Atlanta at Spring and 5th streets near Georgia Tech, Anderson's alma mater. The West Point native arrived at Tech in 1952 with a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in industrial engineering. He got his start in textiles at Callaway Mills in west Georgia.

Anderson recently spoke with the Journal-Constitution about the transformation taking place at the company's LaGrange factory, where most of the Flor carpet tiles are made for the residential market.

A long wall in the building's administrative offices tells the story through photos and milestones since Anderson's "epiphany" in 1994, when he read "The Ecology of Commerce" by Paul Hawken.

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