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

Greenpeace Crashes Coal Meeting with Fake Identity

It’s like Silverleaf Resorts in reverse! Greenpeace got into the 2008 McCloskey Coal USA conference by posing as a pro-coal organization. Calling themselves the Institute for Energy Solutions, Greenpeace was able to become a co-sponsor and set up a booth at the conference. The McCloskey group figured out who they were, but decided to let them speak anyway.

From Reuters:

Greenpeace spokesman Carroll Muffett was allowed to speak against coal as a polluting fuel for a few minutes, and the team manned a booth offering information and anti-coal paraphernalia.

“It’s a lot of value for the money,” said Muffett of the $8,500 co-sponsorship fee that made the Greenpeace front group publishers of the conference brochure.

In the brochure, an ad for the fake Institute seems pro-coal, but if readers go to the www.tomorrowsenergytoday.org website, they are redirected to www.coal-is-dirty.com.

The Greenpeace team handed out business cards that read: “The Institute for Energy Solutions is a joke. So is clean coal.” The cards were signed Greenpeace.

Awesome! We’re glad to hear they were able to get their message out. Of course, they did manage to offend a few people by using Muffett’s 9-year-old daughter and two boys aged 10 and 11 to hand out athsma inhalers and masks. Muffet rebuffed the criticism by declaring that the real issue is the fact that the coal industry causes athsma in children.

Props to our friend Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog for getting his Coal-is-Dirty.com site linked up!

Link [Reuters]
Photo credit: Flickr user greenpeace.italia

Another Great Video From Greenpeace: Chemicals Will Smack Down Your Sperm Count

Certain Chemicals can reduce your fertility. Nice work Greenpeace. Check out the video:

What a way to drive home the point. (pun not intended, but very much appreciated).

Until We Have Sun Shining Out Of Our Asses, We Should Switch to CFL Bulbs

You are my sunshine. My only sunshine.

Patrick Moore of Greenpeace Falls to Dark Side; World Collectively Yawns

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has defected, advocating for something he once fought against, and our response is: who cares?

Moore, who once stringently opposed underground nuclear testing, is now supporting the use of nuclear power. He believes that building hundreds of nuclear power plants is the only viable alternative to coal-fire electricity generation, stating that wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal and other renewable energy sources simply don’t have enough potential.

Moore now represents the Clean Air and Safe Energy Coalition, a nuclear-backed energy group, and has also taken on several causes that don’t jive with Greenpeace values, such as old-growth logging. He claims that a background in science has caused him to see things differently.

From Idaho Statesman:

“We don’t believe we have been making too much electricity,” he said. “We believe we’ve been making energy with the wrong technologies.”

His critics, like Andrea Shipley, executive director of the Snake River Alliance, say he has simply sold out.

“The only reason Patrick Moore is backing something as unsafe and risky as nuclear power is he is being paid by the nuclear industry to do so,” Shipley said.

There are those who will try to turn this into a big to-do about the reality of climate change, but the fact is, his credibility has gone down the drain, and one more person cheerleading dumb causes like nuclear energy won’t amount to much. Patrick Moore becoming a Sith Lord isn’t going to put a dent in the cause.

Link [IdahoStatesman]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Axis of Corporate Evil: Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA Hired Black Ops Private Security Team to Spy on Green Activists

Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and the NRA hired the private security firm Carlyle Group to get all “black ops” on eco-activists asses. They rumaged through their garbage to find confidential documents (the lesson here- shred your papers) and even social security numbers.

A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies.

In addition to focusing on environmentalists, the firm, Beckett Brown International (later called S2i), provided a range of services to a host of clients. According to its billing records, BBI engaged in “intelligence collection” for Allied Waste; it conducted background checks and performed due diligence for the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm; it provided “protective services” for the National Rifle Association; it handled “crisis management” for the Gallo wine company and for Pirelli; it made sure that the Louis Dreyfus Group, the commodities firm, was not being bugged; it engaged in “information collection” for Wal-Mart; it conducted background checks for Patricia Duff, a Democratic Party fundraiser then involved in a divorce with billionaire Ronald Perelman; and for Mary Kay, BBI mounted “surveillance,” and vetted Gayle Gaston, a top executive at the cosmetics company (and mother of actress Robin Wright Penn), retaining an expert to conduct a psychological assessment of her. Also listed as clients in BBI records: Halliburton and Monsanto.

Evil motherbleeping corporations. Souless, hungry, exploitative corporations. Grrr… This stuff makes Mr. Cranky Green mad!

Link [Mother Jones] via [The Raw Story]

The Department of the Interior Arrests a Protesting Greenpeace Polar Bear

Why do the Feds suck so much? They make us take our shoes off when we fly, tap into our phone conversations illegally, and arrest our protesting polar bears.

Wait, wha?

Yup, the Department of Interior (also known as the Department of Buzzkill) had a peaceful protester dressed as a polar bear arrested in front of their Washington, DC headquarters.

Here’s what Greenpeace has to report about the whole affair:

A Greenpeace activist was arrested today for peacefully protesting the Bush Administration’s delay in issuing a final Endangered Species Act listing for the polar bear due to global warming. The activist, dressed in a polar bear suit, initiated a vigil by sitting in a paddleboat in a park pond in front of the Department of Interior.
While the Department of Interior is dragging their feet on protecting polar bears, they are moving full steam ahead on plans to drill for oil in prime polar bear habitat. New oil leases are opening up in the Chukchi Sea and oil companies are lining up quickly to obtain licenses to drill. A fifth of the remaining Arctic polar bears depend on Chukchi Sea ice in their hunt for food.

In December of 2005, Greenpeace and two other conservation groups sued the Bush administration when it missed its first legal deadline to respond to the petition for an endangered species listing. On December 27, 2006, the Service announced its proposal to list the species as “threatened” and had one year to make a final listing decision. The legal deadline for doing so was January 9, 2008.

Here’s the video of the takedown.

Swing over to the Greenpeace blog and read the whole story.

Link [Greenpeace] via Boing Boing