Word: braungart
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...profession, William McDonough is an architect and industrial designer. But by temperament and ambition, he is much more: a visionary, a prophet, even a zealot. In his new book, Cradle to Cradle, written with business partner Michael Braungart, McDonough dreams of a world without waste, a world without poisons, a world in which all materials are continuously recycled. He thinks sneakers, for example, should have biodegradable soles so that whatever material scrapes off onto the ground can be readily consumed by worms and microbes. The ultimate goal is to create a sustainable world, enabling humans to "love the children...
...revolutions go, this one has a large number of theorists and manifestos. Besides McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle, there is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken (founder of gardening supplier Smith & Hawken), Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins; it makes a strong case that natural resources should be just as valued a part of our capital base as factories and machines. Biomimicry by Janine Benyus encourages companies to look to nature for possible design techniques. She cites San Francisco's Iridigm, whose flat screens for mobile electronic devices produce color in a manner similar to the way microscopic structures...
...That sounds like the rant of utopian cranks, but both authors are respected even in the boardroom. McDonough is lead architect on a $2 billion project to rejuvenate Ford's massive River Rouge plant; Braungart helped found Germany's Green Party. Rather than flog humans for being wasteful beasts, they celebrate our propensity to consume, insisting there are ways to make that impulse a healthy part of a dynamic ecosystem. In Cradle to Cradle, the authors question why shampoo bottles, yogurt containers, and candy wrappers aren't made of biodegradable material. Why can't trainers be designed to eventually fertilize...
Recycling as we know it is stupid, or so say architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press; 208 pages). The environmentalist mantra of reduce, reuse and recycle is based on the singularly flawed idea, according to the authors, that all things must pass into waste. Even if you turn that pop bottle into a fleece jacket?by applying brute force and chemical processing?that seemingly useful incarnation is just an additional step between raw material and landfill. "If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have...
...truth is that McDonough isn't an architect at all, or is only occasionally an architect. In collaboration with his friend German chemist Michael Braungart, he has begun or completed designs for nontoxic shower gels, fabrics that do not contain mutagens or carcinogens, dolls made without PVCs, biodegradable yogurt cartons, and a recyclable Nike sneaker made with soles that, when they disintegrate, will serve as nutrients for the soil. Among the larger projects, besides the Gap building, are the Nike European Headquarters, an environmental-studies center at Oberlin College that will produce more energy than it consumes, the Monsanto Child...
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