Ray Anderson, the businessman with probably the longest track record and highest profile for practicing “green” business in the country, is giving a talk on sustainable business practices from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday at the Rhode Island Convention Center.

His presentation, sponsored by the Apeiron Institute for Sustainability, is free to the public.

Anderson is chairman and founder of Interface Carpets, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpets for commercial and residential use. In the last quarter alone, his company had sales of nearly $200 million.

Anderson has estimated that since 1995, when he decided to make his company more sustainable, he has saved more than $336 million, cut fossil fuel use by 45 percent and cut his company’s contributions to landfills by 80 percent.

He has spoken often about the “spear in the chest” epiphany he experienced in 1994, when he read Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce while preparing a speech for his employees about the company’s environmental mission. Hawken, the entrepreneur behind the Smith and Hawken garden supply company, was calling on First World businesses to stop “buying and degrading other peoples’ environment.”

In an industry that typically rips up and throws away old carpeting and replaces it with new carpets made from petroleum-based products, Anderson charted an entirely new course, titled Mission Zero.

Anderson’s goal is to eliminate negative impacts on the environment by the year 2020.

“If we’re successful, we’ll spend the rest of our days harvesting yester-year’s carpets and other petrochemically derived products, and recycling them into new materials; and converting sunlight into energy’ with zero scrap gong to the landfill and zero emissions into the ecosystem,” Anderson said in 1997. “And we’ll be doing well . . . very well . . . by doing good. That’s the vision.”

Anderson has traded a luxury car for a Prius, built an off-the-grid home and written a book about his efforts, titled, Mid-Course Correction.

In the last few years, he has been the subject of major stories in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Mother Jones and Fortune.

He co-chaired the President’s Council on Sustainable Development and was named one of TIME International’s Heroes for the Environment in 2007.

For more information about Anderson and his company, go to www.interfaceglobal.com.

To learn more about Apeiron, go to www.apeiron.org.

plord@projo.com