Via Treehugger, Metropolis magazine has posted a transcript of a talk by Scott Charon and Susan Lyons from furniture company Herman Miller. The talk was given at Metropolis's conference Design Entrepreneurs: Rethinking Energy.

As the eco-geeks among you likely know, Herman Miller is way out ahead of almost any other company on the planet in pursuing cradle-to-cradle principles. Charon and Lyons dive into some of the details, and it's fascinating, fascinating stuff. Here's a tease:

We have an initiative called Perfect Vision; by the year 2020 we want to be a totally sustainable company. That means we want to have zero landfill, zero hazardous waste, and zero air/water emissions. We want to purchase 100 percent renewable energy, and to have all our buildings at least a minimum of Silver LEED certification.

We want to make sure that 100 percent of our products are designed from the environment protocol. Today we are at about 16 percent, last year we were only at about 6 percent. Improvements have been made not only with our new products coming out of the gate, but with our existing products as well.