Interface was committed to becoming the world’s first environmentally sustainable company in 1994, smokestacks, the take-make-waste linear economy, petroleum-intensive products and disconnected supply chains were the norm. Since then, the company has been striving to get their factories to ‘zero’ impact, use recycled and closed loop materials, develop low carbon products, and make their supply chains sustainable. 20 years after envisioning becoming a sustainable company, they finally have the data to figure out how to really achieve that. It is about taking that next step towards positive and acting more like an ecosystem.” And it is all about rethinking factories as forests, instead of treating forests as factories that caused many environmental destructions in the process of factory production processes since the industrialization era.
Factory as a Forest has been designed to complement companies’ existing strategy, whether as a project alongside existing initiatives or as a vehicle to help achieve goals such as net positive buildings or contributing to the SDGs.
It can be boiled down to a four-step process:
1) Identify a local reference ecosystem
One way to do this is by using Resolve’s Ecoregions 2017 interactive map, which allows you to zoom into locations on a world map to find out what their ecoregion is and which others are nearby. For example, Vancouver is located in a temperate conifer forest biome, but more specifically, it is in the Puget lowland forests ecoregion and adjacent to the British Columbia coastal conifer forests ecoregion.
With this information, you can start to dig into some specifics. What are the ecosystem services provided by local, healthy ecosystems near your site? Vital ecosystem services include carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, air filtration, water storage and biodiversity support, to name a few. Rovalo recommended the Ecology Pocket Guide as a helpful design tool for non-biologists.
Experiencing the environment you want to replicate can help overcome barriers and serve as a common thread for different stakeholders to discuss and come together around.
2) Quantify the performance
Once you’re familiar with your ecosystem muse, you can start to measure its Ecosystem Performance Standards (EPS) and setting goals and performance benchmarks for your site around ecosystem services such as water storage and purification, pollution detoxification, soil fertility enhancement or supporting pollinators.
It is importance of narrowing down your focus to what is manageable and what fits with your company’s operations and strategy. From there you can identify and decide on specific metrics.
3) Create design strategies
Continue keeping your local ecoregion in mind while developing design strategies to reach your goals. Where the site is will help determine what will be effective. For example, the effectiveness of rainwater collection will be much different in Arizona compared to Thailand.
Biomimicry helped to localize the designs.
4) Implement design
Scaling such an approach is one of its biggest challenges, not only because of its place-based nature, but also because metrics for ecosystem services and parallel facility metrics remain imperfect. While a multi-national company may not have very much transferable knowledge from one of its facilities to the next, neighboring facilities could benefit.