William McDonough Industrial Revolution

McDonough He’s been called "Mr. Green," "The Green Dean" and "The King of Green." William McDonough has been a pioneer in the new wave of environmentally sustainable building, starting with his first major commission in 1984, constructing the New York City headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund—one of the country’s first green offices. For that project, McDonough asked his suppliers to provide him with a list of chemicals in their products to determine their toxicity; he was told it was proprietary information.

Environmental awareness and green building have changed dramatically since then, thanks in part to McDonough’s work on other commissions that followed. These include projects for the Gap, Nike and Herman Miller and, most notably, a 20-year, $2 billion environmental re-engineering of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Mich., with a 1.1 million square foot "living roof." In 2002 he wrote with German chemist Michael Braungart the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which takes to task the traditional environmental mantra—reduce, reuse, recycle—claiming that it perpetuates a "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that creates loads of hazardous waste and unsafe living conditions. McDonough and Braungart instead advocate for products that either degrade to nourish the earth or are continually circulated.

McDonough was dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia from 1994 to 1999, and still lives and works in Charlottesville, where he recently made time to sit down with Editor in Chief Susan Breitkopf to talk about safe sneakers, toxic water, what museums can do and enjoying life.

Museum: I just was going through your book Cradle to Cradle. You start out with a description of the dangerous substances found in one’s home. Now I’m terrified of everything around me.

William McDonough: Oh, no! You’re supposed to be the opposite. You’re supposed to be in celebration of the entire world.

It’s definitely inspiring, but it’s scary how harmful the world can be. Is the book a call to action?

It is a call to action. Michael [Braungart] and I in our next book are looking at alternative worlds, and the first world that we see happening is business as usual, and if we just keep perpetuating the same systems, we’ll get what we have now, but in spades . . . which I think most people realize isn’t really the choice of our species at this point, that we have to do something about toxification, about climate change and so on and so forth. The second option I think we see is the sufficiency model, where people try to reduce their badness. But it’s still a bad result; it just takes a little longer, and with the population growing, the less badness gets offset by the more activity. It doesn’t really change the business-as-usual model in the end.

And then the third option we see is that people get really afraid and start to regulate and start regulating really hard. A lot of regulations can be well meaning and well intentioned, but can actually produce the wrong result. You’ll see things like ethanol getting regulated through subsidies or through specific regulatory structures, and so the whole regulation strategy isn’t necessarily the most propitious. For us, the [only option] is Cradle to Cradle, which is design with ecological conscience.

Since the book has been out, have you seen a lot of impact from it?

It’s been very widely distributed, and it’s become a textbook in many colleges and universities. It’s sold over 200,000 copies. And we’re getting a lot of interest from industry.

Was that whom you were addressing? Not necessarily individuals, but corporations?

Yeah. With Cradle to Cradle, the question for the individual hasn’t necessarily been answered. The next book will be more focused on what to do, because a lot of the things we’re proposing in Cradle to Cradle hadn’t come about yet. If you look at sneakers, they are a problem because of the lead stabilizers in the rubber; they are not designed for safe recycling. But it wasn’t as if we could say in Cradle to Cradle, "Go out and buy the X sneaker," because the X sneaker didn’t exist, whereas now it does. Nike’s got a brand called Considered, which in many respects utilizes a lot of the strategies in Cradle to Cradle. We’re about to get started with another company that makes sneakers.

So you worked on developing the Considered brand with Nike?

We developed a chemicals database with Nike, which they then developed into a supply-chain-
integrated protocol that they’ve executed internally in the company.

Something I was thinking about while reading the book was that at one time thalidomide was thought to be completely safe and would revolutionize morning sickness. It turned out to cause horrible birth defects. How do you know that what you’re putting into these Nike sneakers is safe?

That’s a great question. I think there are two ways to look at that. One, we use the precautionary principle: If we have a choice, we defer to the most cautious option. So we’re not looking at a lot of experimental chemicals that haven’t been tested or haven’t been characterized for ecological and human health. We look for things that have been in use and have been peer reviewed over many years. The second is the whole issue of toxicology and how toxicology is actually approached. Typically, toxicology is based on dose and duration. How big a dose and for how long, right? If we look at thalidomide, I don’t know what the testing around it was, but if it had any risk associated with it, we would look at that and say, "We prefer not to use that. We prefer to use something else or not use anything."

Water can be highly toxic. If I submerged you in water for six minutes, you’d be dead. That’s the wrong dose for the wrong duration, right? If you hit water at 200 miles an hour falling out of an airplane, it’s the wrong dose for a very short amount of time.

Point well taken.

So water could be seen as a toxin, depending on how it’s used. If you took ten bottles of aspirin, that could get you. We just prefer to avoid those situations by design.

And not drown anybody.

Right.

I didn’t get a sense from Cradle to Cradle—or in anything I read concerning your work—that you’re looking to the government to do something about environmental hazards. Are you asking industry to take care of this on its own and not really calling for more government regulation?

I think government should see that a regulation is a signal of design failure. So when something is being made that is damaging to society, it’s the role of the guardian, the state, to step up, and say, "We can’t have that damaging society." Then what happens? Forces start to come into play and create a regulation of some description. And then you’ll have people against the regulation, for the regulation. Commerce is typically against regulations and likes to be free to function. Civic groups, not-for-profits and environmental activists and things like that in this world are for regulations because they set level playing fields and can raise the bar on performance equality. So that’s all quite interesting. [But] to us, it’s a signal of design failure.

So government takes a backseat and just sets the bar, but shouldn’t be relied on for everything. Industry should really step up to the plate.

Step up to the plate and move quickly, because we need this done quickly. The problem with regulations is once the regulation is set, if it’s wrong, it’s set for a long time. It’s not as flexible as the market. If you look at the whole ethanol situation, for example, once the government said "let’s go" to ethanol, everybody’s running around doing ethanol. But the food-versus-fuel debate is raging right now. I don’t know that it was the smartest thing to set ethanol as the protocol for replacing gasoline. What about electric cars? What about solar power? What about all the other kinds of things that we’re
really going to need for a long-term future that don’t involve nitrification of soil in our waters and don’t involve chemical fertilizers and genetic engineering or take food out of the mouths of babes?

Are you presenting it as a moral obligation that industry should be doing this?

No.

How do you motivate these companies?

We don’t use the word "should" or "must." We took those out of Cradle to Cradle. We actually did a global search, punched the word should and the word must. If you find any, let me know. We’ll take them out of the next edition.

It’s not a moral question. It’s a quality question. How can something be high quality if it destroys the planet or makes people sick? Look at the business that you’re in: museums. In the design of a museum today, if somebody designs a building that was sick or destroyed the planet, what is that telling the people coming to the building? It’s telling them that they’re not important and that the planet’s not important. It’s telling them that only one thing is important, which is our content, this didactic. But the fact is the museum is a place of didactic communication. And so let’s communicate what the building itself is about physically. This will become one of the fundamental issues of any museum, because it is a fundamental question of human enjoyment.

Many museums are struggling financially. Most of them are not the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So what can they do with the resources they have?

They can ask questions. That’s something we can all do. What we’re developing is a list of questions that can be asked of a supply chain. So a museum that has a facility can ask the kinds of questions that lead to cradle-to-cradle-type concerns for buildings. The workshops in museums that use glues, papers, plastics, wrapping and crating and all that could be looking at sustainable systems to support their daily activities without it costing a lot of money. It’s just asking a question. And then see what kind of answers you get.

Is that being "less bad"?

No, not if it signals your intention to be more good. That’s the difference.

So that, in and of itself, wanting to be completely good, is at least a step in the right direction?

It’s a critical part of what cradle-to-cradle is. It honors transition. It honors the fact that people are where they are now and have to transition into a new place. What we don’t want them doing is being lulled into a sense of false belief that they’re making progress if they’re simply just trying to be less bad. So if a group in a collection care component of a museum said we’re going to use less toluene in our adhesives or use less adhesives so that we reduce our toluene release, there’s no reason they couldn’t be shifting their adhesives to nonvolatile-based adhesives. That would be more good instead of less bad.

What about your spare time? Are museums part of that? Do you have spare time?

Definitely. I studied art before architecture, so I spent a lot of time at museums. I took two trimesters off in Dartmouth College to go to the great museums of Europe. So I just went from one museum to the next all over Europe. The Museum of Modern Art is always the first place I would go in New York when I land in the city. And now we’re talking with a museum in New York about doing a show there based on our thinking. When I travel, the one thing I try and do is see museums when I’m not working because it’s such a great way to connect quickly and thoroughly with culture. That’s why museums are so critical. Because if you have one thing to do, go to a museum. You learn a lot.

Do you find it informs your work?

Our work is didactic in itself. So the whole idea that a building is full of meaning is really what we’re about, too. Our buildings are like mini-museums of the issues that we care about. For example, our environmental study center at Oberlin College is an exhibit of how a building could make more energy than it needs to operate and purify its own water.  

Given your roots, what made you move beyond architecture? What made you want to transform all kinds of different processes?

Well, in 1989, I won a competition in Frankfurt to design a daycare center. And when we were doing research on that, we noticed that all the children were putting their mouths on everything. And it occurred to me that it would be really important for us to design things that could be safely taken into a child’s mouth. Because they would chew on the furniture, chew on the building and chew on anything you handed them. So I started looking for an ecotoxicologist. That’s why, when I met Michael, I’d been searching for someone like Michael. Michael’s probably the world’s preeminent ecotoxicologist, so it was a real great privilege to meet him. He said, "You’re the one who can make this really become known in the world. You can actually lead this thing and do this thing." And it didn’t occur to me that I could take that position, because I was just an architect trying to make a better building.

Why did he think that?

I think he recognized that there was a passion and an ability to communicate and things like that that I didn’t quite recognize, because I was in the center of the hurricane. I was in the eye of the storm. So I think he just recognized that I would probably have the ability to communicate this idea.

Do you walk the talk? Is everything you’re wearing environmentally sustainable?

No. I try to enjoy life. I think that’s really important. I focus on surrounding myself with the things that I like and the things that we can change as we change them. If you look around this room, the carpet is my design and [can be easily and safely recycled]. The basecoat of this carpet is a thermoplastic that is infinitely reusable. So when I finish with this carpet, I call and say I’d like to change it. They take it back. Recycle it. I get new carpet. The cycle gets maintained. But we’ve also analyzed the top fibers for ecological human health. So as I upbraid this carpet and breathe it, it’s not giving me cancer. So that’s one example, the technical nutrient. The fabric you’re sitting on is a biological nutrient. The window shades are the first non-PVC-based window shades of this kind.

In the meantime, I like to wear black clothing. So I wear black clothing. My shoes are of traditional making. But we’re looking at changing the process for tanning leather that has no chromium in it. We slowly change the world as we move through it.

Your forthcoming book is going to focus more on individual habits or more on solutions, right?

It’s going to focus on the social dimension of cradle-to-cradle as well as the economic dimension. In the first book, we talked a lot about the natural systems and how humans needed a new design protocol. In the new book, we’ll talk about why this is important to society, that if we’re going to have 8 billion to 10 billion people on the planet, cradle-to-cradle is actually essential in order to have that many people celebrating life, that if we don’t have cradle-to-cradle, then people will look at a child being born in India and say, "Oh, a population problem." Any child that’s born and is considered a population problem means that human rights ceases to exist.

We really need to understand that there are a lot of materials and energy that can be put into cycles that will allow us to manifest our potential as individual humans without guilt. In that sense, it affects the individual, but I think really at the macro level it allows society to celebrate being on the planet itself instead of bemoaning our existence or just worrying about the limits to things. Because if all technical material was in cradle-to-cradle cycles, then it doesn’t matter that you’ve got clothing that you’re going to throw away when it wears out because it’s going to either go back to soil or back to technical cycles. All of a sudden everybody will be able to have clothing. I think there’s a tendency to just go natural. But we’re not talking about going natural; natural won’t save us. If we all go back to natural systems, we’re going to be in a desperate condition. We absolutely need a technical universe of human production in order to accelerate the planet. Cradle-to-cradle is the only strategy that we’re aware of that actually allows everyone to celebrate human artifice.

Sidebar

We are accustomed to thinking of industry and the environment as being at odds with each other, because conventional methods of extraction, manufacture, and disposal are destructive to the natural world. Environmentalists often characterize business as bad and industry itself (and the growth it demands) as inevitably destructive.

On the other hand, industrialists often view environmentalism as an obstacle to production and growth. For the environment to be healthy, the conventional attitude goes, industries must be regulated and restrained. For industries to fatten, nature cannot take precedence. It appears that these two systems cannot thrive in the same world.

The environmental message that consumers take from all this can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter now inconvenient, to limit your consumption. Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children—or none. Aren’t the major problems today—global warming, deforestation, pollution, waste—products of your decadent Western way of life? If you are going to help save the planet, you will have to make some sacrifices, share some resources, perhaps even go without. And fairly soon you must face a world of limits. There is only so much the Earth can take.

Sound like fun?

We have worked with both nature and commerce, and we don’t think so.

Excerpted from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. New York: North Point Press, 2002.