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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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William McDonough
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 20
Architect
Designer
Environmentalist
Writer
Tōkyō
William Andrews McDonough
Tell
Doe
Mean
Mind
Good
Regulators
Regulation
Telling
Lead

More quotes by 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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The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.
William McDonough
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To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.
William McDonough
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Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.
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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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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In planetary terms, we're all downstream.
William McDonough
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them right, with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.
William McDonough
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You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.
William McDonough
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Honor commerce as the engine of change.
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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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