Bringing Green Design to the Mainstream  

Joel Makowevr has an interview with "Cradle to Cradle" pioneer Bill McDonough at Greener Buildings - Bringing Green Design to the Mainstream.

Joel Makower: Bill, one of the things you talked about is the fact that recycling or when we recycle, we're simply recycling a lot of the problems that we've already created -- and yet there's opportunities to take some of the products in the waste stream and turn them into less toxic products. Tell me about that.

William McDonough: Well, if you look at the, you know, use of materials which are questionable like PVC or even PET in our water bottles that contains antimony as a residue from a catalytic reaction, we're realizing these are suboptimal products in a Cradle to Cradle world where we would want everything safe and healthy by design. So, when we look at something like PVC, we say, "Well, why can't we park that somewhere until we figure out what to do with it?" When we look at PET, we wonder why we can't bring it back and actually scrub out the antimony and put it back into the marketplace refreshed and clean, so we're essentially what we call up-cycling it. When we look at recycling, we see that typically things are either down-cycled and they're losing quality in the process of being reused or they're recycled and they come back in the same condition effectively or we can up-cycle things and actually purify them and clean them up on their way back through the cycles, so we're excited about the prospect of up-cycling plastics.

JM: Well, why not just create a whole new plastic all together? Why go through all this?

WM: Well, I think in the long run we're gonna need to take advantage of all the feedstocks that are out there and use them effectively. I mean otherwise we'd find ourselves developing strategies to, say, burn the plastics that exist out there that are suboptimal, but when you go burn antimony-laden PET, what you get is antimony trioxide in the air, which is a known carcinogen, so is burning it gonna be the solution? I don't think so. So, you know, what we really want to do is actually put these things back into useful cycles and so we need transitions to the future. We won't be able to do this overnight. ...

JM: So there's all these new sort of design or at least materials, protocols and materials categories, I guess, that are coming out and I'm wondering -- where does it all come together? So, for example, there's biomimicry. There's green chemistry. There's Cradle to Cradle. First of all, is there much of an overlap among those? Biomimicry is not a material; it's a discipline. .. Because ultimately if you're a designer you want a whole toolkit to choose from.

WM: Yeah. Well, I think all those tools are sympathetic. I mean, if you look at biomimicry, which is such a, you know, fabulous way to think about approaching problems, it gives you an inspiration and it gives you touch points and reference points and sort of miracles that you can connect to, the miracles of the world around us. But, you know, you could be designing a product that is unsafe that looks like something that nature might have done in terms of its physical characteristics, in terms of its attributes in the world. It's something that would walk on ceilings but drops bombs, you know. I mean, so a tool only has a value based on the intention and the purpose to which it's put, so when we look at biomimicry, for example, I mean it should be celebrated for all the joyful aspects of its characterization of the world as an inspiration, so that fits really beautifully.

When we look at other systems, green chemistry works perfectly with Cradle to Cradle because Cradle to Cradle incorporates green chemistry. Cradle to Cradle also incorporates this idea of biological and technical nutrition as two distinctions for product development. It includes renewable energy or includes clean water, and it includes social fairness, which, you know, it may not be inherent in green chemistry, per se. So, I think they're all sympathetic with each other and they all fit together as a kit, so, you know, we encourage people to think in biomimicry terms. We encourage them to think in green chemistry terms and we encourage them to think in Cradle to Cradle terms simultaneously.