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photo credit: Wa-J

The retirement of Steve Jobs has been major news over the last few days, but a few weeks ago the world lost another great business leader in Ray Anderson. ‘Lost’ in the greater meaning of the word.

Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, Inc passed away on August 8 after battling cancer.

I remember being a business student at SFU watching the documentary The Corporation. In that movie Ray Anderson is interviewed and he details how he became awakened to the massive impact corporations have on the environment. This is the clip from the movie:

After watching this I remember being curious enough to grab myself a copy of The Ecology of Commerce. As a business student I was inspired by a leader who would be so willing to so fully embrace a complete paradigm shift in the way he allowed his company to continue to operate. Ultimately, not only did Ray Anderson make a dramatic course change at Interface, but he did all of it while showing sustainability is good for the bottom line of the company. And we’re not talking about a mom and pop operation, but a company where a rise or fall in a few percentage points of revenues represents millions of dollars.

The Ecology of Commerce, as it did for Ray Anderson, had an immediate impact on me. I began reading all the books written by Hawken as well as other authors on environmental issues. I wanted to learn more on the subject and signed up for the Net Impact group on campus. Net Impact’s goal is to ‘inspire the SFU and larger community to embrace Corporate Environmental and Social Responsibility and sustainable development values.’ While the group never really got off the ground that year, I ended up quitting my job at the bank I was working at, and through a friend in that group I ended getting a job with a small start-up software company downtown Vancouver. The company made software to help organizations to visualize and track goals around the Triple Bottom Line. As a business student it was great for me, as I learned just how hard it is to get a company off the ground with very limited resources. Doing sales for a small start-up was dramatically different than customer service for an almost 200 year old multinational. We also go to work with leading companies, municipalities and non-profits on the forefront of tackling environmental issues, and I learned a lot about business and the environment, which was my goal.

While today I’m no longer working in the field of environmental issues, I would definitely be somewhere different in life if not for having been inspired by Ray Anderson.

Below is a terrific talk he gave for TED, a must watch.

“At his carpet company, Interface, Ray Anderson has increased sales and doubled profits while turning the traditional “take / make / waste” industrial system on its head. In a gentle, understated way, he shares his powerful vision for sustainable commerce.”

There is also a nice article here which summarizes his great work in environmentalism.

Anderson was one of the most vocal proponents of environmentalism’s role in business. He founded Interface, a producer of free-lay carpet tiles, in 1973, and it grew to be a $1 billion company and the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet.

Anderson set a seemingly radical goal for the firm: “Mission Zero,” a commitment to eliminate any environmental impacts by the year 2020. Shortly before his death, he estimated that the company was more than halfway towards this vision. Interface says that in the past 17 years, it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent, fossil fuel consumption by 60 percent, waste to landfill by 82 percent and water use by 82 percent, while avoiding over $450 million in costs, increasing sales by 63 percent and more than doubling earnings.

If you haven’t been following the Gulf Coast oil leak there is a good chronological recap available, starting at April 20:

Explosion and fire on Transocean Ltd’s drilling rig Deepwater Horizon licensed to BP; 11 workers missing, 17 injured. The rig was drilling in BP’s Macondo project 42 miles southeast of Venice, Louisiana, beneath about 5,000 feet of water and 13,000 feet under the seabed. A blowout preventer, intended to prevent release of crude oil, failed to activate.

and going until yesterday, May 11:

Executives with BP, Transocean and Halliburton appear at congressional hearings in Washington, where Senators criticize their safety records. The executives blame each other’s companies for the explosion. The oil slick washes ashore on a third land mass: Louisiana’s Port Eads area, on the southern edge of the Mississippi Delta.

So just how big is the leak? Here’s a visual perspective of the size as of May 6 (click for larger view):

Placing the spill over Vancouver, it reaches from Nanaimo, over the Fraser Valley, and all the way to Hope and beyond. That’s a lot of area, and that was as of May 6. The oil continues to spew from the cold depths of the ocean at an estimated rate of 210,000 gallons of oil per day, all day, every day,  thus far unchecked. It’s a matter of a few weeks before this passes the amount of oil spilled during the infamous Valdez spill in Alaska. What makes this far worse than Valdez, however, is rather than rocky coast line being destroyed, this oil has the potential to make its way into porous marsh land. Land that will soak it up like a sponge and will be impossible to clean. Just how bad might this get? The answers may lie this article which has a good overview of the likely impacts of the Gulf Coast oil spill in the short and long term:

…Scientists say they can’t predict more than a few days in advance where the oil is heading. If it slips into the powerful Loop Current, it could spread toward South Florida, get picked up by the Gulf Stream and head up the East Coast before it turns at Cape Hatteras, N.C., toward the open sea.

That could prove disastrous for Florida’s enormous tourism industry, with 80 million visitors drawn yearly to its pristine beaches.

A growing slick could cut into a commercial fishing industry that produced about 1.27 billion pounds of fish and shellfish in 2008 with a dockside value of more than $659 million, according to the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council.

Beyond that, more than 3.2 million people fish for fun in the gulf each year.

Damage to the wetlands could cost society billions of dollars in lost natural filtration of water and protection of property from storm surges. The coastal areas also are important habitat for birds, shrimp and many other forms of life.

There’s still hope that a new strategy will work. BP failed over the weekend to get a 78-ton cofferdam over the leaking pipe. This week it plans to try what’s been called a “top hat,” a smaller device treated with hot water and a solvent that would capture the oil so that it could be pumped to a barge. Another possibility is the “junk shot” _ using shredded tires, golf balls and knotted rope to clog the leak.

Meanwhile, thousands of workers kept up efforts to hold the spill back from land: spraying chemical dispersants, skimming, laying booms and burning oil on the surface.

Jackson, however, thinks it’s highly likely the oil will hit, and that’s something he saw up close once before. He was in charge of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama in 1986 when a tank ruptured at a refinery, dumping oil on the Caribbean coast.

“What we learned was never, ever let oil get into a mangrove coast. You’ll never get it out. It’s like a sponge you rub on a greasy bacon pan. You need very hot water and a lot of soap, and you still might just give up and throw away the sponge.”

The gulf’s coastal sea-grass beds and mangroves are full of burrowing animals that make millions of holes. Oil works its way out of the holes eventually and then storms flush it back into the water, creating what amounts to a new spill.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., an opponent of offshore drilling, said it would be his “worst nightmare” if the oil flowed for nearly three months more until the relief well was complete.

“It’s going to cover up the Gulf Coast and the wind is eventually going to keep it going south and it’s going to get into the Loop Current, and the Loop Current comes south and comes through the Florida Keys, where 85 percent of the live coral reefs in the country are,” Nelson said.

“We’re talking about massive economic loss to our tourism, our beaches, our fisheries, and very possibly the disruption of our country’s military testing and training in the eastern gulf,” he said.

….When storms blow up _ hurricane season begins June 1 _ the oil will be driven into the marshes and “then the problem will build up more and more, because you just can’t stop it,” McKinney said.

If anyone is interested, you can use this tool to place the oil spill over any geographic location in Google Earth.

Update: TreeHugger posted this new video of the leak itself:

You’ve seen Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff right?

The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute film that takes viewers on a provocative and eye-opening tour of the real costs of our consumer driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration.

Annie Leonard, an activist who has spent the past 10 years traveling the globe fighting environmental threats, narrates the Story of Stuff, delivering a rapid-fire, often humorous and always engaging story about “all our stuff—where it comes from and where it goes when we throw it away.”

There’s a new video out now called The Story of Bottled Water:

It was recently announced that Vancouver now boasts the world’s purest tap water.

Metro Vancouver supplies tap water for our region. The source is rainwater, which is stored in the Capilano, Seymour and Coquitlam reservoirs. Five hundred eighty-five square kilometres of mountainous watersheds are closed to public access to protect these large supply lakes.

The new Seymour-Capilano Filtration Plant is now supplying filtered water to Vancouver and other communities in the western half of the region, from the North Shore to Delta.

Metro Vancouver’s tap water is arguably some of the best drinking water in the world, and it costs you only about $0.8 per 1,000 litres, or $0.0008 per litre. A single-use one litre bottle of water can cost you as much as $1.75 a litre.

When you buy a bottle of water, you’re buying more than a bottle of water. The total amount of energy embedded in our use of bottled water can be as high as the equivalent of filling a plastic bottle one quarter full with oil.

• It takes 3 litres of water to produce 1 litre of bottled water
• The production and transportation of bottled water contributes to greenhouse gas emissions
• Even if the bottle is recycled, more energy is needed to reuse the plastic

So ditch the bottle, and start using tap. Grab a Brita filter if you feel the need, but you’ll be saving yourself a lot of money.

Via DeSmogBlog via Grist