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

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