On May 29, Desso, a leading European carpet and sports surfaces company, won the 2012 Guardian Sustainable Business Award for the Waste and Recycling category for its implementation of Cradle to Cradle® design in its business strategy.

  “This is a fantastic endorsement of all the hard work the people at Desso have undergone to transform our business,” says Stef Kranendijk, CEO of Desso. “I am especially delighted because the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards recognise entries that have made a real impact and look for business models that can be replicated. We have found that the Cradle to Cradle® strategy boosts our profits and innovation but it also helps us deal with the most pressing environmental challenges we face as a society. And we hope it will be adopted by others, so that together we can achieve scale in going beyond sustainability.

  “We are moving away from the linear economy of ‘take, make and dispose’ towards the circular economy,” adds Kranendijk, “As estimated in a new report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation this represents an economic opportunity of up to $630 billion per year in Europe or almost 4% of the EU’s annual GDP.”

  Since 2008, Desso has been embedding a Cradle to Cradle® strategy into its business model, whereby it designs products for disassembly and recycling. The aim of Cradle to Cradle® is to redesign the way we make things so that our  products consist of positively defined materials which can be recycled on an infinite basis.

Desso’s goal is that by 2020 all its products will be designed according to Cradle to CradleÒ principles and a large proportion of the energy consumed will be renewable.