Table Of ContentThe author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use
only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright
infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you
are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher
at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Foreword by President Bill Clinton
Introduction
1. Life Upcycles
2. Houston, We Have a Solution
3. Wind Equals Food
4. Soil Not Oil
5. Let Them Eat Caviar
6. The Butterfly Effect
7. What’s Next?
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Making of This Book
Also by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Praise for Cradle to Cradle
About the Authors
Copyright
To our families,
and to all of the children,
of all species, for all time
Glance at the sun.
See the moon and the stars.
Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings.
Now,
Think.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Betrachte die Sonne.
Sieh den Mond und die Sterne.
Erkenne die Schönheit der Natur.
Und dann denke nach.
—Hildegard von Bingen
If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and
one minute resolving it.
—Albert Einstein
We have this remarkable experience in this field of fundamental physics that beauty is a very
successful criterion for choosing the right theory. Why on earth could that be so?
—Murray Gell-Mann
The goal of the upcycle is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world
with clean air, water, soil, and power—economically, equitably, ecologically,
and elegantly enjoyed.
Foreword
I first met Bill McDonough in the early 1990s, when he brought some
remarkable design ideas to Greening the White House, an initiative I launched to
dramatically reduce the White House’s energy consumption and make it a model
of efficiency. Bill, an American architect, had just teamed up with the German
chemist Dr. Michael Braungart to write the Hannover Principles, which were
already becoming an international touchstone in green circles. This set of ideas,
about how to design safe cities, homes, and workplaces, and how to endlessly
reuse the earth’s resources more efficiently and more effectively, struck me as
something bigger than an academic exercise. These ideas made sense, and they
were doable.
Bill and Michael proposed that a better-designed world would be good for
business, good for people’s health, and good for the environment. Their first
book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, introduced these
ideas to the broader public and gave momentum to the sustainability movement,
urging us to eliminate the concept of waste and arguing that no resource ought to
be considered dispensable. I’ve watched as many of the concepts presented in
Cradle to Cradle have taken root at the U.S. Postal Service and NASA, at small
businesses and corporations as large as Walmart and Procter & Gamble, and in
countries all over the world. I’ve seen how these simple ideas, when put into
practice, can improve productivity and make people happier and healthier.
In 2008, I visited Make It Right, the program Brad Pitt founded with Bill’s
consultation to help Hurricane Katrina victims return home to New Orleans’s
devastated Lower Ninth Ward. The program’s designers and builders were
applying Cradle to Cradle principles and processes throughout the construction
of the new houses. A few years later, I heard from a woman who had spent three
years in emergency housing in Texas but had finally returned to New Orleans
thanks to Make It Right. She had a daughter who had always wanted to take
dance lessons. After she’d moved into her new, healthier, low-cost home, not
only did lower utility bills enable her to afford some lessons, but her daughter’s
once-severe asthma disappeared because of the cleaner interior materials. She
could breathe again—and dance.
That is the essence of Bill and Michael’s work—the genuine desire to help
others, coupled with intellectual curiosity and a deep commitment to constant
improvement. They work to transform “good enough” into the very best. They
focus on making the right things the right way.
After a long career in elected office and more than a decade traveling the
globe for the Clinton Foundation, I’ve learned that we get the best outcomes
when we make decisions that are rooted in evidence and experience—when we
put aside ideology and focus on what works. The ideas that Bill and Michael put
forward in this book come from an honest sensibility that transcends the daily
finger-pointing of left, right, or even reverse. They just point forward.
The Upcycle is a book about creativity, about thinking big even if we have to
act small, and about approaching problems with a bias for action. It encourages
us to find solutions through close observation, innovation, and the study of real,
local conditions and needs. This is the approach that has made Bill and
Michael’s work so effective over the years—whether it’s working to design a
super-efficient building with NASA, partnering with some of the world’s biggest
companies to devise renewable products and energy systems that are good for
the bottom line, or helping victims of Hurricane Katrina get a new start in better,
more healthful houses.
The optimist says the glass is half full and the pessimist says it’s half empty.
Bill and Michael say it’s always totally full—of water and air—and they are
constantly working to share that full glass with more people, to make it even
bigger, and to celebrate the abundance of the things that enable us to thrive.
In the pages that follow, Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart invite you
to think about the future we share; to imagine what could be and how to make it
so. We are all in this together, and we’ll need a global commitment to
sustainability if we want our children to inherit a world of shared opportunity,
shared responsibility, and shared prosperity. Let’s get to work.
—President Bill Clinton
Introduction
Imagine you are sitting in the top-floor boardroom of a major United States
consumer products company and you are meeting one-on-one with the
company’s executive in charge of sustainability. You have been to this facility
many, many times before. Over seven years, you have met with executives in
charge of finance, supply chains, manufacturing, product design, research and
development, and marketing. Hundreds of meetings to listen, to learn, and to
explore your new concepts for sustainable growth and beneficial innovation.
Together, you and the executive have shared data—lots of data. You know
big-picture business issues facing this company and detailed chemistries of the
products. You even know how many lightbulbs are used to illuminate the
enterprise worldwide, how much energy that consumes, how many lightbulbs
contain mercury, and how many people it takes to change a lightbulb and what
that costs.
This is the nature of the work. To use a detailed, defined inventory as a
platform for invention, innovation. To ask and answer: What’s next?
Outside the giant plate-glass windows, tall granite-clad skyscrapers stand
proudly in the sunshine. The Brazilian mahogany table is polished to a shine,
and the high-backed leather chairs remind you of the important executive
decisions made in this room, which can affect the lives of millions of people—
for better or for worse. One might say you are here chasing the butterfly effect.
Given the scale of this company, one small decision has the power to make a real
difference for the economy, for people, and for the planet.
That is one reason you are here—scale. But you are also here for another
reason—velocity. Many of the largest corporate enterprises in the world have
come to realize the downside of the butterfly effect, the repercussions of modern
business that are obviously damaging and too often unaccounted for—famously
called externalities, such as carbon in the atmosphere, toxic materials, poisoned
rivers, lost rain forests, and so on, with no end of this decline in sight. Many
businesspeople realize this is not good business. They like to know what they are
doing and to be able to account for it, but they feel like they are driving a car
without a gas gauge or even, shall we say, a battery charge indicator? It makes
them nervous.
They also are like Olympic athletes who want to be on a safe, level playing
field and who do not want to be left behind. They want to lead.
You might just ask this executive friend, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you
could commit not just to reducing your carbon emissions but to being 100
percent renewably powered? Couldn’t we find a way to make such a statement?”
The executive pushes the question aside. “We can’t do that,” he says. “No
matter how much we would like to declare ourselves that way. Look, we could
only get a small percentage of our power for our factories from solar on our
roofs. We and everyone else have been saying we’ll cut our carbon emissions 20
percent by 2020. Isn’t that enough? Because of the nature of business, we have
to be conservative and risk averse. We can only describe actual performance
goals that are realistic. How in the world can we say we are going to seek
renewable energy for our entire global enterprise? Consumers don’t care and
environmentalists won’t trust us, or if we launch the initiative piecemeal—which
is the only way we could—the public awareness of the issue will become a point
of concern for all the other products made by the company. For example, if we
say these plants are renewably powered, it will raise the question of ‘Why not
the other ones?’ and it’s a big, long job getting there. Our shareholders will think
we’ve lost sight of our revenue and profit goals.”
“What if you just state your intention?” you suggest. “Say, ‘We will be
renewably powered as soon as it is cost-effective, and we will constantly seek it
out.’ Any shareholder can understand that plan. It’s true, and declaring your
intention does the heavy lifting of getting people in the company to get moving
in this direction. You’ve charted the goal. You’ll track your progress and report
it. You’ll unleash the creativity and genius of your people in a clear, clean
direction. You’ve made them want to search for the renewable power solution
every time they go looking to supply a kilowatt-hour. It lets other industries
know that if they can manufacture the solar panels or wind turbines or biogas
collectors at a competitive price point, they will have a customer in you. And
you, their customer, are likely to lead to other major customers. Before you
know it, the renewable power industries are growing technologies and jobs in a
businesslike way all across the United States, around the world. Your intention
itself is powerful.”
“Okay, I get it,” the executive says. “I’ll put this in terms the business will
understand and take this to the CEO.”
This story actually happened. We didn’t have to look far to see how this was
just one executive in this mammoth company, against the endless horizon of
people in offices outside the plate-glass windows. This was one person, but this
person could take a message to the leadership that would launch innovation as
inspired as sending a person to the moon. In a few short months, the company
announced it would pursue the goal of being renewably powered. All kinds of
marvelous innovation busted loose within days. Factory managers started
calling, saying, ‘Can I go first?’ ‘What can I do to get on board?’ Velocity.
We tell this story without names for two reasons. The first is that this is not a
unique story and the point of telling it is to focus on and celebrate the power of
intentionality. We know that everyone—consumers, manufacturers, government
leaders—is interested in a cleaner, healthier world. Many companies with whom
we work are delighted to embark on creating a renewable energy base. They
would also love to make their products with only fully defined healthful
materials. But society has factionalized to become so mutually suspicious that
often consumers and customers don’t think companies want the same positive
healthful future they want, and companies think critics will pounce on them if
they even lift their heads to break out of the norm to say, “We want to try. We
are trying. We have embarked on the work of being renewable or pursuing only
clean production or fully healthful products, but we have more work to do.”
We hope this book, if nothing else, will inspire you to start and will cheer
you on. We believe in constant improvement. Sometimes you can’t do it. It
doesn’t work. Fine. Try another way—do it again and again. Restate your
intention. Watch what happens.
Secondly, we tell this story without names because we want you to see
yourself as both of these individuals in the conference room. All it took was one
advocate and one executive to craft a strategy and to move it toward the head of
the company, and an entire international corporation was changed. That person
could be you in your job, your daily life. When we say “start,” we also want you
to start thinking of yourself as a potential leader. As a person who changed his or
her company, home, country for a better, more beneficial future. This book is
written for you. We hope to encourage and inspire you with the how and why of
creating a more abundant, joyful world for future generations.
*
Now we want to tell a story that names names. We were in a meeting with
Walmart talking about how they could keep improving their environmental
footprint in the world. Walmart is intent on being 100 percent renewably
powered and has stated so very publicly; they are now the largest corporate users
of solar collectors in the United States. Walmart is also working with local food
growers to cut down on shipping vegetables long distances, thus making air and
atmosphere cleaner. Of course they have a great deal of work to do, but they are
starting and well under way. We were talking about products, how to use only
positively defined ingredients in packaging in goods sold in the stores. The
question on the table was “Is it really possible?” Just then, we noticed a United
States Postal Service Priority Mail box on the desk behind the executive. “Let’s
turn it over,” we said.
The executive did just that.
There was the little certification stamp: Cradle to Cradle CertifiedCM.
That meant that the mailer had gone through our certification process to
identify the chemicals and processes used to make the product, and that the
product was fully defined—meaning we had identified and assessed every
ingredient—and was on its way to its beneficial optimization of materials,
logistics, energy, water, and social fairness. There we were observing Walmart
observing USPS’s commitment to being healthful.
In China, Goodbaby, the world’s largest maker of childrens’ products,
already has published a road map showing how it will adopt Cradle to Cradle
standards company-wide. We name these names to show you that the most
mainstream companies in the world are thinking in this positive way. We think
you can too.
This philosophy, and this book, are the upcycle of our previous work.
*
A decade ago, we—Bill, an architect, and Michael, a chemist—published Cradle
to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. We had come across an idea in
our design and chemistry work that we considered extraordinarily exciting.
Human beings don’t have a pollution problem; they have a design problem. If
humans were to devise products, tools, furniture, homes, factories, and cities
more intelligently from the start, they wouldn’t even need to think in terms of
waste, or contamination, or scarcity. Good design would allow for abundance,
endless reuse, and pleasure.
This concept, we believe, could move the dialogue far beyond a simple
interest in recycling, because we noticed that the entire recycling effort grew
from a negative belief. The theory being put forward by most sustainability
advocates, and increasingly by industry, goes something like this:
Human beings create enormous amounts of waste and should strive to
become “less bad.” Use less energy. Poison less. Cut down fewer trees.
According to these current “best practices,” all people can hope to achieve is
eco-efficiency, minimization, and avoidance, to recycle a limited percentage of
objects humans use daily—bottles, paper—and fashion them into, unfortunately,
a lesser product, one that can be used once more, or twice more, or maybe even
five times more. But then where does this product go? Into a landfill? An
incinerator?
That might not be so bad if the product were well designed from the first. It
could become a nutrient in the biosphere. Or stay in the technosphere—as a
reusable metal or plastic—instead of contaminating the biosphere, the entire
ecosystem.
This project, as big as it sounds, is obviously not impossible: Nature itself
designs this way.
But as modern engineers and designers commonly create a product now, the
