Who’s Who in Green - William McDonough

William McDonough, along with last week’s Who’s Who in Green, Michael Braungart, developed one of the most important eco-concepts of our time: the Cradle to Cradle design philosophy. McDonough, a Hong Kong-born American architect, is also the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, a sustainable design firm with clients like IBM, Nike and Gap Inc. Through McDonough’s work over the years, we’ve all come to realize how important it is to keep the environment in mind when building new structures.

McDonough has won three U.S. Presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the National Design Award (2004) and the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003). He’s been recognized by TIME Magazine as a ‘Hero of the Planet’, and enjoys world renown for his work as an architect and designer.

Along with German chemist Michael Braungart, McDonough founded McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), a product and process design firm that emphasizes their concept Cradle to Cradle design and the implementation of eco-friendly design principles. Cradle to Cradle products and services are designed to mimic processes in nature, eliminating the concept of waste to instead give something back to the earth when the item’s usefulness has passed. Since McDonough and Braungart published their co-authored book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things in 2002, the concept has been eagerly embraced as an innovation that could very well help us save the earth from a future clogged with trash.

The Nike European Headquarters and the Chicago City Hall Green Roof, by William McDonough + Partners

In February of 2005, McDonough addressed a crowd in Monterey, California about signs that our planet is in danger, what motivated him to join the environmental movement and how Cradle to Cradle can help us move in a better direction. Check out the video below:

McDonough spoke of his limited scientific knowledge and how he gets around that, and what he’s most excited about to the Architectural Record in a 2007 interview:

I rely on a chemist for chemistry, and I need a multi-disciplinary team to do my work, but I don’t have to know chemistry. I think the important thing for architectural education is to teach that we need multi-disciplinary teams to do the green work. Not every firm can have a chemist, but they can rely on us for chemistry. We’re doing the chemistry of products and materials. We’re looking to create a cadre of thousands of designers who use the same index for ecological intelligence.

Two aspects are exciting to me in terms of my work. One is that many people are adopting cradle to cradle and the specific strategies that Michael and I are proposing. It’s a framework that can be understood by anyone. Things go back to nature; they go back to industry. The result is clean water, clean air, people being treated fairly, and life goes on. The other is that with so many people taking this up, I can now move on to the next level. Clients have become sophisticated, which allows us to continuously push the envelope. So we don’t market ourselves; we respond to the marketplace.

McDonough may not be a scientist, but he’s one of a very promising new crop of environmental leaders who are helping to get our society back on track. The Industrial Revolution is deeply flawed, and we’re only beginning to see the consequences of 20th century manufacturers’ lack of consideration for the waste factor. Cradle to Cradle and other eco-friendly design principles are going to help us move forward in a way that’s responsible and sustainable.

If you’d like to hear William McDonough speak in person, check out the Green Festival in Washington, DC on November 8th.

William McDonough’s Green Score: 79,593

Who’s Who in Green - Michael Braungart

Michael Braungart, the subject of this week’s Who’s Who in Green, is a German chemist who was a founding member of Germany’s Green Party and co-developed the ‘cradle to cradle’ design concept. He’s also an author, and founder of EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency) in Hamburg, Germany. For 14 years, Dr. Braungart has also been teaching process engineering at the University of Lüneburg in Suderburg, Germany.

Before he was a renowned scientist and professor, Dr. Braungart spearheaded the formation of the Chemistry Section of Greenpeace International, and became leader of the Chemistry Section in 1985. He spent years ‘climbing on dirty chemical plant chimneys’ and even lived in a tree as protest.

In 1995, Dr. Braungart and William McDonough joined forces to create McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a consultancy firm that has helped giant corporations like Nike, Ford and Hermann Miller conform to the Cradle to Cradle concept.

Along with McDonough, Dr. Braungart wrote Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a book that has revolutionized the way products are created and disposed of. In essence, the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept calls for all manufactured items to be designed from the beginning with the intention of eventually recycling it.

In 2007, Dr. Braungart addressed the Cradle to Cradle conference in the Netherlands. In the clip below, Dr. Braungart takes toy giant Mattel to task, calling them “the worst company I can imagine”.

The Cradle to Cradle concept takes its cues from biomimicry, with the slogan WASTE=FOOD. Not food in a human dietary sense, but in a sense of biological nutrients allowed to decompose naturally to be utilized by something else. Dr. Braungart explained it to the Royal Society of Arts in London:

“Traditionally people think linear from cradle to grave which means that at the end the whole earth will be a graveyard because we lose all the material. We have a lot of energy put on this planet but we don’t have material input except maybe some meteorites. But in this context we need to think about how to make material products that they go back into nutrient cycles forever. And we distinguish between two cycles – things which get consumed like food, like detergents, like shoe soles, like brake pads, are designed to be biological nutrients. Right now Australia looses about 5000 times more topsoil that is regained per time unit and so we need to rebuild soil to be able to feed all the people on this planet. That’s a biological cycle.

And the technical cycle are things like washing machines, TV sets etc. You don’t consume them, you only use them, they’re technical nutrients so you cannot design a TV set without heavy metals. I have been analysing a radio and I identified 2800 different chemicals in a radio yet do we really want to own toxic waste or do you just want to listen to good radio programs like this one for example. And then you see you don’t want to own toxic waste, you only want to have a service, but these materials are rare and they are toxic so they need to be able to be designed to go back in a technical nutrient cycle. So this is cradle to cradle.”

He’s been called a ‘radical ecovisionary’, but Dr. Braungart’s concepts are really quite simple. He believes that sustainability is the bare minimum – in order to go beyond simple maintenance, we must think in an entirely different way.  His theory is that we don’t have to work so hard at conservation and cutting back our footprint on the earth if that footprint is providing nutrients back into the earth. In essence, as he has said, “our footprint can be designed to be beneficial for the other species on this planet”.

In 2003, Dr. Braungart was honored with the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his work with EcoWorx carpeting tile. Dr. Braungart’s work has been published in numerous journals on science, public affairs, environment and design in the U.S. and Europe. He also teaches at institutions of higher learning all over the world.

Michael Braungart’s Green Score: 72,378

Photo credit: Braungart.com

Cradle to Cradle Design: 100% Biodegradable Furniture

In the last few decades, furniture has gotten incredibly wasteful. Think about how many crappy items you’ve purchased – tables, chairs, desks, bookshelves – that were made with such cheap materials in such a shoddy way that they fell apart after only a few years. Such throwaway furniture has increased the amount of crap that piles up in landfills day after day. You might think that going back to sturdier, more well-made furniture is the answer, but what if we could have 100% biodegradable furniture that could just be composted in your garden after you’re done with it?

Triplepundit has it:

A recently created design house by eight Dutch design students has embraced C2C fully. The company, called Artishok, has just completed its first designs after spending months researching the best 100% biodegradable materials for modern furniture.

The team was directly inspired by William McDonough, an architect, and the chemist Michael Braungart, the two inventors of C2C. The duo believes that another Industrial Revolution is at hand which is concentrated around ecological production methods.

The Artishok design studio embodies this perfectly, creating furniture from corn based plastics. Artishok’s products look no different than other designer stuff and the advantage of the Artishok items is that they virtually do not contribute to your carbon footprint. After use, you can safely throw the furniture on your garden’s compost heap without polluting the soil even 1%. That means that the eight students are about as close as any designers to replicating the natural cycle directly.

Because they’re made of 100% natural materials, they eliminate the garbage problem completely. Can you imagine, millions of people across the world never throwing another piece of furniture in the trash? That’s the direction we need to go in, for sure.  I can’t wait to see more furniture designers embracing the cradle to cradle concept!

Link [Triplepundit]
Photo credit: Flickr user jetheriot