Michael Braungart - Toward An Eco-Industrial Revolution

Can you imagine walking in a beautiful park somewhere and seeing a sign that reads, "Please Litter"? You'd probably think you had accidentally stepped into the twilight zone. But we're not talking about some weird alternate reality here; this is the future envisioned—and being created—by Michael Braungart.

Ingenious chemist and eco-engineer Braungart is making strides to eradicate industrial and consumer pollution by designing and developing waste-free systems. Called Cradle-to-Cradle Design, his system offers a framework for designing products and processes based on a simple equation: Waste = Food. By this logic, manufacturing systems can be carefully designed and engineered to produce only recyclable waste, and consumer products mass produced so that, at the end of their useable life, they are able to be returned to nature as biological enhancements rather than as intractable waste.

Some day very soon you might find yourself carelessly tossing your trash out the window, secure in the knowledge that those snack wrappers are going to melt into plant-friendly fertilizers and that your old cell phone—made of completely biodegradable material—cleverly harbors native plant seeds and the nutrients to make them grow.

BIO

Michael Braungart is a chemist, author, and founder of EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency) International in Hamburg, Germany, and cofounder of MBDC (McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry) in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both EPEA and MBDC share a common set of values that embraces intelligent, aesthetic, and eco-effective design. Through these activities, Braungart has developed tools to design eco-effective products and business systems and has worked with a number of organizations and companies in a range of industries. Since 1994, Professor Braungart has been teaching process engineering at the University of Lüneburg in Suderburg, Germany, also serving as director of an interdisciplinary materials-flow management masters program.

He coauthored the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things with architect William McDonough in 2002. In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his work with EcoWorx carpeting tile. He has also accepted a visiting professorship at the Darden School of Business, lecturing on such topics as eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, Cradle to Cradle design and Intelligent Materials Pooling, and he continues to teach at institutions of higher learning all over the world.