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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.

William McDonough

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William McDonough
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 20
Architect
Designer
Environmentalist
Writer
Tōkyō
William Andrews McDonough
Products
Cradle
Food
Cycle
Whether
Industrial
Earth
Cycles
Grave
Closed
Graves
Manufacture
Waste
Equals

More quotes by William McDonough

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The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.
William McDonough
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We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.
William McDonough
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We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.
William McDonough
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All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.
William McDonough
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We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.
William McDonough
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I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.
William McDonough
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It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.
William McDonough
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I can't imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it's destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it's not ecologically intelligent at this point?
William McDonough
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In planetary terms, we're all downstream.
William McDonough
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If design is the first signal of human intention.
William McDonough
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This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.
William McDonough
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So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.
William McDonough
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The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious - as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.
William McDonough
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The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.
William McDonough
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Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.
William McDonough
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Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.
William McDonough
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You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.
William McDonough
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In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'
William McDonough