William McDonough
William McDonough
William Andrews McDonough is an American designer, advisor, author, and thought leader. McDonough is founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistrywith German chemist Michael Braungart as well as co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance, also with Braungart. McDonough's career is focused on creating a beneficial footprint. He espouses a message that we can design materials, systems, companies, products, buildings, and communities that...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth21 February 1951
CountryUnited States of America
At this point I don't want to discuss any future other than saving the shipyard,
I dont think theres any likelihood in the world that he will reject the list,
This dovetails nicely with what we're doing. Our role is to help Wal-Mart workers get a voice on the job.
I can think of no more important project than this one because its ambitions are so high.
It was an easy dunk for the commission to decide that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy (Gordon English) were just way off base,
If you depart from those expectations -- that is, if you break the rules, if you ignore the spirit of the law even while meeting the letter -- woe be unto you. There will be consequences, and they will be grave.
There is no question that the U.S. economy, especially in relation to the world economy, is beginning to exhibit signs of imbalance and strain.
And to use something as elegant as a tree? Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, makes complex sugars and foods, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates. and then why don't we knock that down and write on it?
If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.
We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.
Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.
If you don't like carbon, if you want to be zero carbon, then you might as well shoot yourself, dry up and blow away because you are carbon.
Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.