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

Categorized in : Mean Business Effectiveness

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

design understanding mean

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

nature writing food

Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.

William McDonough

design dream firsts

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.

William McDonough

nature taken animal

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

age stones thinking

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

waste earth want

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.

William McDonough

community mind trying

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

earnest be-good trying

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

climate-change ends use

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

motivation inspiration humility

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

goal air water

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

William McDonough

eco heal way

We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?

William McDonough

creativity vision intelligent

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

design forever thinking

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

effectiveness nature fall

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

William McDonough

sustainability forever

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

William McDonough

optimistic business people

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

fusion environmental fun

Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.

William McDonough

optimistic design

Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.

William McDonough

tragedy warning culture