Braungart is the recipient of numerous honors, awards, and fellowships from the Heinz Endowment, the W. Since 1984 he has been lecturing at universities, businesses, and institutions around the world on critical new concepts for ecological chemistry and materials flow management. Prior to starting EPEA, he was the director of the chemistry section for Greenpeace. Michael Braungart is a chemist and the founder of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Hamburg, Germany.
In 1999 Time magazine recognized him as a "Hero for the Planet," stating that "his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that-in demonstrable and practical ways-is changing the design of the world." In 1996, he received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the highest environmental honor given by United States.
From 1994 to 1999 he served as dean of the school of architecture at the University of Virginia. William McDonough is an architect and the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, Architecture and Community Design, based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are).Įlaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.
As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism
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