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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
Waste
Equals
Products
Cradle
Food
Cycle
Whether
Industrial
Earth
Cycles
Grave
Closed
Graves
Manufacture

More quotes by William McDonough

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We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.
William McDonough
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We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem
William McDonough
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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?
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'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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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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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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If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.
William McDonough
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Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.
William McDonough
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The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.
William McDonough
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If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.
William McDonough
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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.
William McDonough
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Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!
William McDonough
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The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
William McDonough
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Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.
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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In planetary terms, we're all downstream.
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 so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.
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