Resource Abundance by Design | William McDonough at World Economic Forum

Summary

In "Resource Abundance by Design," William McDonough presents a thought-provoking perspective on sustainable design in his speech at the World Economic Forum. He challenges traditional notions of design by emphasizing the importance of viewing design as an intention to create a good impact. McDonough delves into the principles of Cradle to Cradle design, advocating for materials and structures that harmonize with nature, essentially viewing buildings as trees. Drawing on his journey and collaborations, he discusses how design can transform society by utilizing resources effectively, fostering a circular economy, and imbuing architecture and manufacturing with sustainable, positive intentions.

Highlights

• Design—first signal of human intention: be more good, not just less bad. 🌟
• Hiroshima—a city destroyed faster than built. The importance of understanding human actions. 💭
• Inspiration from nature: buildings like trees that provide energy, food, and clean water. 🌳
• Technical and biological metabolisms working for humanity's benefit. Partnerships with materials. 🤝
• Exploring past mistakes like the toxification in USSR to better today's environmental practices. 🌎
• A vision of cities as productive organisms growing food and cleaning water like natural ecosystems. 🌆

Key Takeaways

• Design is a powerful tool that signals human intention to be more than just 'less bad,' but to be 'more good.' 🌟
• McDonough challenges the notion of sustainability as merely maintaining status quo; instead, it should be about creating abundance and 'more good.' 🌍
• Architecture can mimic nature, like buildings operating as trees—capturing solar energy, cleaning water, and supporting life. 🌳
• Technological and biological metabolisms should serve both humanity and biodiversity, promoting a circular economy. ♻️
• Materials should be seen as nutrients and designed for perpetual cycling—returning safely to nature or industry. 🔄

Overview

William McDonough opens his talk by redefining design as the embodiment of human intention, striving beyond the notion of being 'less bad' to achieving 'more good.' He invokes a twelfth-century poem to highlight the importance of respecting and working harmoniously with nature. From Japanese traditions to city structures, he draws on a variety of inspirations that shape his philosophy about design.

McDonough shares his philosophical journey that intertwines architecture with ecological principles. His collaborations with Dr. Michael Braungart led to revolutionary ideas about using materials intelligently within the biosphere's cycle. He discusses innovations where waste equals food, highlighting successful projects that exemplify buildings as trees.

The final leg of his journey stresses the need for a shift in commercial thinking—from how much can be taken, to how much we can give. Through examples like rehabilitating cities to designing modern, sustainable buildings across the world, McDonough inspires a new outlook in the design to build a sustainable, prosperous future rich with opportunities for growth.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction and Cradle to Cradle Concept The introduction chapter discusses the key themes of the book, focusing on the terms resource, abundance, and design. The author, alongside German chemist Dr. Michael Braungart, introduces the concept of 'Cradle to Cradle' and 'The Upcycle,' aiming to create a 'world of good' through intentional design.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Sustainability and Human-Nature Relationship The chapter discusses the concept of design as a reflection of human intention. It explores the idea of moving beyond just minimizing harm ('being less bad') to actually creating positive impacts ('being more good'). A twelfth-century poem is referenced to highlight a deeper connection with nature, urging people to observe and reflect on the beauty of the natural world.
• 03:00 - 04:30: Personal Background and Design Philosophy This chapter delves into the personal background and design philosophy intertwined with spirituality and nature. The speaker reflects on the divine delight and wonder that nature provides to humankind and emphasizes the responsibility humans have to collaborate with nature. Sustainability is highlighted as a pivotal concept, underscoring the necessity of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world for survival. The discussion invites reflection on individual connections with nature and sustainability.
• 04:30 - 06:00: Negative Entropy and Biology The chapter explores the concept of negative entropy in relation to biology, starting with a personal anecdote from the author's childhood in Japan. The author describes their early experiences with sustainable practices, such as the use of human waste as fertilizer in farming. These practices illustrate a form of negative entropy, where waste is transformed into something useful, symbolizing a harmonious relationship between cities and farms, akin to a single organism. This sets the stage for discussions on sustainability and the interconnectedness of biological and ecological systems.
• 06:00 - 10:00: Designing Buildings and Materials The chapter begins with a reflection on the interconnectedness of farms and cities, emphasizing their unity. It includes a personal anecdote, drawing on the historical example of Hiroshima, a city that experienced rapid destruction during World War II. The author reflects on how cities take a long time to build yet can be destroyed very quickly. The chapter sets the stage for exploring the motivations and capabilities of humans in causing such destruction, hinting at a deeper investigation into the reasons and possibilities behind human actions in the context of building and destroying cities.
• 10:00 - 15:00: Economic and Environmental Impact The chapter discusses the aspirations of a college student studying international relations. The student's quest for understanding international phenomena leads them to explore the special theory of relativity in physics. The student learns about the massive energy potential described by Einstein's equation E=mc², which becomes gigantic when a large value of c (the speed of light) is squared, even with a small mass like a hydrogen atom. This principle underlies the power of the atomic bomb. The chapter concludes with the idea that the value of a tool (like physics) is determined by the purpose humans assign to it.
• 15:00 - 18:00: Global Challenges and Waste Management The chapter discusses the concept of design as a signal of intention, leading to reflections on entropy. The narrator ponders the chaotic disaggregation of carbon, minerals, and water and wonders about the existence of its opposite, negative entropy. Unable to find it in scientific resources, the exploration leads to the understanding of how carbon transitions into the atmosphere.
• 18:00 - 24:00: Projects and Solutions The chapter 'Projects and Solutions' delves into the concept of negative entropy, emphasizing the role of biology in aggregating dispersed elements. It highlights nature's capacity to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it into the soil. The chapter also discusses the primary natural income sources for the planet, which include solar energy, carbon, nitrogen, and the release of oxygen. Overall, it presents an ecological perspective on energy and resource management.
• 24:00 - 30:00: Innovative Building Materials and Systems The chapter titled 'Innovative Building Materials and Systems' explores interdisciplinary connections between physics, chemistry, and biology. The discussion mentions Francis Crick's contribution to understanding what constitutes a living organism, which includes having growth, income, and an open system of chemicals benefiting the organism and its reproduction. This highlights the preciousness of mass (m) in this context, suggesting that mass is a critical and finite resource apart from other elements.
• 30:00 - 32:00: Commerce and Generosity The chapter starts with a notion of valuing resources greatly, hinting at sustainable architecture. It includes an idea about designing buildings inspired by trees, which can be self-sufficient by growing food, generating energy, and supporting communal activities. An example discussed is a daycare center in Germany, where children actively engage in its operations. This experiential learning raises questions about sustainability, leading to a collaboration with chemist Michael Braungart to further explore the concept.
• 32:00 - 35:00: Conclusion and Call to Action The chapter concludes by discussing the importance of designing materials and systems where waste becomes a resource rather than a problem. This concept draws inspiration from natural systems, like the biosphere, where materials circulate in a way that benefits living organisms and supports their reproduction. The discussion highlights that humans have developed a technical metabolism over the past 5,000 years, characterized by advancements in material and metalwork. By aligning both natural and technical metabolisms, we can create sustainable systems that benefit our species. The chapter likely ends with a call to action for implementing these ideas in practical, systemic ways to support environmental sustainability and human flourishing.

Resource Abundance by Design | William McDonough at World Economic Forum Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hi everybody. I'd like to take a look at these words. Resource, abundance, and design. That's what we're here to talk about. I've had the opportunity to work with German chemist, Dr. Michael Braungart, and we've written Cradle to Cradle and then The Upcycle and what we're looking at is a world of good and how to do that by design.
• 00:30 - 01:00 Because I see design as the first signal of human intention. If we intend to be less bad, perhaps we'll still be bad, just less so by definition. So what would it mean to be more good? Let's start with a poem from the twelfth century. "Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of Earth's greenings. Now, Think." Glance. See. Gaze. Think.
• 01:00 - 01:30 She goes on to say, "What a delight God gives to humankind with all these things." A delight. Beauty. Wonderment Then, "All nature is at the disposal of humankind." This has been part of our thinking. "We are to work with it, for without it, we cannot survive." This turns into sustainability and the use of the natural world. When you think about sustainability, if I asked you what your relationship was with
• 01:30 - 02:00 your loved ones and you said, "Sustainable," I would say, "I'm sorry." It doesn't sound that interesting. Now, I was born in Japan in a traditional Japanese house. As a baby at three years old, I would lie on a futon and I would listen to the oxcarts as the farmers collected our sewage. And they would take it to the farms. This is the Netherlands. And the cities and the farms were always one organism, and I always thought, "Isn't this great. Poop stories."
• 02:00 - 02:30 The farms and the cities are one thing. This is a city that I heard about as a five year old, which is Hiroshima. And then I heard about this. Cities which took thousands of years to build, took seconds to destroy. It takes thousands of years to build. It takes seconds to destroy. And I thought to myself, "Someday I'm going to understand why people might do this to each other and how is it even possible to do this."
• 02:30 - 03:00 When I was nineteen and I was in college, I decided I wanted to study international relations, which I did, but then I wanted to understand how this could even happen. So the professor in physics said, "You must understand the special theory of relativity because the answer is there." And when I realized that if c is a huge number approaching infinity and square it, it's gigantic, and if m is a one like in one hydrogen atom, then the E is gigantic and that is the atom bomb. And a tool's value is put there by the purpose to which the human puts it.
• 03:00 - 03:30 Design is the signal of intention. And then I stared at a fire burning and I thought about entropy. And I said, "Is this all we have? This chaos of carbon and minerals and water that never can re-aggregate? Is that what we're learning?" And I said, "There must be negative entropy," because I'm from Asia. We must have the opposite. What would it be? I couldn't find it in the physics library. I found extrogy, enthropy, I found lots of things, but not negative entropy. Until I realized that what's happening here is that carbon is going into the atmosphere,
• 03:30 - 04:00 the oxygen is coming down, and the reason I couldn't find negative entropy in physics is because from a design perspective, it's biology. That's why. These are the are the aggregators of things that have been dispersed. There's the co2. Nature has found a way to take co2 out of the atmosphere and put it in soil. And you realize that the only income of a planet is actually solar energy, carbon, and some nitrogen, and that we release oxygen.
• 04:00 - 04:30 Isn't that amazing? And so you start to think that E and m ... E is physics, m is chemistry, and what about biology? So I studied Francis Crick. After discovering DNA, 9 years later, he wrote an essay for the University of Washington called the Nature of Vitalism. He determined that in order to be a living thing, you had to have three conditions. Growth, income, and an open system of chemicals operating for the benefit of the organism and its reproduction. This is fascinating. This means that the m, the mass, is precious and that its all we have, except for bits
• 04:30 - 05:00 of income up here. So let's treat the mass preciously. And that's when I realized, if I ever became an architect ... For example, I was an art student, I will design buildings like trees. So I designed a daycare center in Germany where the children would operate it, it would grows its own food, make its own energy, provide community laundry. I was sitting with the daycare center teachers, programming it, and I saw that the children were eating and building. So I thought, "Well, wait a minute, what are they eating?" So I decided to find a chemist, which I did, Micheal Braungart, and we stated to look at,
• 05:00 - 05:30 "What about these chemicals" and "What's going on with this open system of chemicals?" And we realized if we could design materials like Crick is talking about, the biosphere, when waste equals food, an open system of chemicals operating for the benefit of the organisms and their reproduction. The humans in the last 5,000 years have developed another metabolism, which the technical one since we started banging metal. And that both these metabolisms could operate for the benefit of our species.
• 05:30 - 06:00 And the reproduction of all species and biodiversity. So, we designed in these two metabolisms. Humility is required because for 5,000 years we never figure out how to put two wheels on our luggage, so we're not as smart as we sometimes think. But then we started to think, "What if we design materials that can go back to nature safely? The things we wear, the things we use in the water, and then things as technical nutrition that go back to industry forever. The polymers, the aluminum." Since 1850, 75% of the aluminum made by humans is still in circulation.
• 06:00 - 06:30 Technical nutrition. Think about this. Even solar collectors. Even if we use cadmium, can be seen as being nutrition for technology the future, as long as they're safe. My first product was a textile where we brought the chemist in and we looked at the rivers with textile mills. This one in Indonesia. We said, "Wait a minute, the river is black. And its toxic. Really." So we redesigned it. We looked at 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry, reduced it down to 38 for wool and
• 06:30 - 07:00 ramie, and made a fabric so safe, the water coming out of the mill, which goes to Lake Constance in the Alps, is clean as Swiss drinking water. Why not? Because we can do this by design. Isn't that astonishing? The trimming, which used to be hazardous waste, became mulch for the local garden club. The company no longer had to send it to Spain for burial or burning. Imagine. So, we took a look at technical nutrition. This is carpet.
• 07:00 - 07:30 Carpet in the United States, we have 1.4 billion pounds of carpet waste in the United States every year. Some of it PVC, very hazardous material to handle. So we started designing this for Berkshire Hathaway, is now the largest carpet company in the world. Technical nutrients skins face shards back to caprolactam, the back is a thermoplastic polyolefin. So the carpet becomes carpet again forever. You're storing your materials on your customers' floors and they can be used ad infinitum to make carpet over and over again.
• 07:30 - 08:00 That's it. We take these materials, we put them in a materials bank, you have a relationship with the customer, which is perpetual. Right before the Earth Summit, a book came out which struck me because I was writing The Hannover Principals and Design for Sustainability and it was a book called Ecocide In The USSR. It pointed out that 16% of the former USSR was uninhabitable. Toxification. This is what we're looking at in terms of arable land. 50% in peril.
• 08:00 - 08:30 What does that take us to today, for example? If you're in China, a couple months ago, this was announced. China has about 12% of its land is arable. If that 12%, just now, this is government statistic, 19.4% has been declared contaminated. Too toxic to grow food. 20%. Imagine that. And what is it. It's cadmium, it's lead, it's the materials that we use to make things like this. Are cadmium and lead bad? No, they're materials. If we use them as solder, they're busy over there.
• 08:30 - 09:00 If we sequester them in technical nutrition, we can use them ad infinitum. But when they get in the biosphere they are neurotoxins, mutagens, carcinogens. This is Hunan Province. This rice should not be eaten. What is a toxin? A toxin is a material in the wrong place. Lead in a computer is solder, lead in a child's brain is brain death. Okay. When did we decide that carbon was a toxin? Imagine. We are carbon. If you don't like carbon, shoot yourself, dry it up, and blow away, because you are
• 09:00 - 09:30 carbon. When did we take carbon from an atmosphere that's been made into an asset over millennia and turn it into a liability? Well, we did it by sending all the ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. Oops, backward, upside-down. And then all of a sudden we got the Greenhouse Effect and now carbon has become a toxin. We did that. Did we do that on purpose? I don't know. Was that our design? If it's not our design, who's got the plan? So, the question becomes, "Can I bring carbon and nitrogen to the soil?
• 09:30 - 10:00 Can we release oxygen by design?" So, I was asked by NASA to think about designing the space station for Mars. And I said, "Before we go to Mars, what if we come back to the blue planet first?" So we got the team that developed the design of the space station, and we got together in Houston and started in the room where they heard the words, "Houston, we have a problem." So we started there.
• 10:00 - 10:30 And this team ... these are people who nuclear powered a station with nuclear energy coming from a reactor 93 million miles away. A safe distance. 8 minutes in wireless, isn't that interesting? So we took that team and decided to build it, and here it is. It's in Mountain View, California. This building can make 120% of the energy it needs from renewable power and purify it's own water down to the last molecule. We did it with a normal federal budget for an office building, ahead of schedule. So let's not just talk about more efficient buildings.
• 10:30 - 11:00 Let's talk about buildings like trees. We want more of them. The problem is so many people today report their environmental behaviors, etc., as, "Let's be less bad. Reduce our carbon emissions by 20% by 2020." If you're telling us you want nothing, why don't we go and put it below the line, because wanting nothing is like saying if I run out of here and jump in a taxi and say, "Quick! I'm not going to the airport." Is this helpful? We're not telling people where we're going. So let's start saying, "We got rid of the bad stuff.
• 11:00 - 11:30 Let's start doing the good stuff." What does the good stuff look like? It's not just reduce your badness. So we do it. Inventory, if it's materials, we do every molecule. We don't want it recrewing in mother's milk. If it's energy we want it clean and renewable. If its water we want it safe and healthy. So let's take a look at all these conditions that we have today over here and these various things, and let's not just shrink their badness and report that we've reduced our emissions. Let's start to increase the goodness. Let's start focusing here, too.
• 11:30 - 12:00 We do both. Out with that stuff, in with this stuff. It's about constant improvement. The idea of our upcycling is that things get better every day, not just less bad. It doesn't mean don't do this reductivism, it means also send a positive message to the children that we have an idea of what the future might look like by design with good intention.
• 12:00 - 12:30 So, just as we look at that, and close it, I would like to think about what it means to have carbon for example, once again, become an asset for humans instead of a liability. We'll start with that, because so many people are concerned on the carbon front. So, Mark, show us how you do that. Thank you. This product is now going through Cradle to Cradle certification review, which is very exciting, because its the design for the circular economy.
• 12:30 - 13:00 We look at materials that are nutrients, we look at materials that have reverse logistics, new business models, new ways of getting these materials back into cycles. We look at essentially waste equals food, and that everything is food for something else. Technology or biology. We take the old paradigm of take, make, waste and we reverse it. At this point in history. God never sent a bill for the trees.
• 13:00 - 13:30 So, what can we do in the future where we can get materials cheaper than free? Think about it. So when we stop and look at ... I call this Either, Ore, and the "ore" is with an "e." You can either get mining of the earth if you're looking for gold, and you make about $210 per ton on the gold. Or, we could mine circuit boards from old telephones and we get about $7,500 per ton. So, what if we mine the cities. What if we mine the things we make now and we start designing the things we make now
• 13:30 - 14:00 for what's next. So we design what's next into what's now and we understand how they relate to ecosystems and organisms. This is a sewage treatment plant. That is sewage sludge. A mechanic working with that discovered the pipes are all clogging up with minerals. So he sent them through an vortex, and guess what happened? That happened. This is known as struvite. That is phosphate. It is a slow-release fertilizer than can be sold at a 12% profit. So all of a sudden we realize that sewage treatment is silly.
• 14:00 - 14:30 We take these valuable nutrients in the biosphere, add chlorine, and throw them in the water. What if we turned that into fertilizer for farmers. Nitrogen, phosphates, we all need 3 to 4 grams of phosphate per day. Where are we going? Kazakhstan? Morocco for this? When they're right there in our cities. When you start to think about it, imagine Paris with roofs covered with farming. Just for conceptual purposes. Imagine Washington DC being highly productive. Isn't that interesting? So, we start to think about what would a city ... This is a one day sketch.
• 14:30 - 15:00 Saying, "Well, wait a minute, what would buildings be if a city grew its own food? How can we start to think about those things?" I did the project for the Ford Motor Company to revitalize this thousand hectare site known as the River Rouge in Detroit. We ended up doing the world's largest green roof. When you stop and think about it, this building is making oxygen, purifying water, and it's saved Ford $35 million in cap ex day one over conventional chemical systems, which means its the equivalent of walking into the board to get permission for this and saying "I have
• 15:00 - 15:30 the equivalent of an order for $900 million worth of cars at a 4% margin." Brad Pitt and I looked at New Orleans and decided to see if we could help after Hurricane Katrina. 10 thousand people were displaced here. So we went and looked, met with the community, started a foundation called Make It Right. Started working with the local residents to see what it meant for them to come home. We decided to build a neighborhood of 150 houses, we're at about 103 now.
• 15:30 - 16:00 We hired architects from around the world, local to international, and we gave the people choices of many designs and they could choose their own. But what I love the most is that children came back from the FEMA trailers with asthma because they had been surrounded by formaldehyde. These kids want to sing and dance, this is New Orleans. The home of the first original American music. If these children can't sing and dance, there's something wrong in the world. So these people have a $400 mortgage, they get their power from the sun, they can afford
• 16:00 - 16:30 to give the kids dance and singing lessons, and the great thing is the children came back. They couldn't breathe. Now they can breathe. This is project in the Netherlands designed to make its own food, power itself. These are office buildings selling in a market where office buildings could be bought for one year's rent. It's because people want to be in places like this and the buildings, they're seen as material banks. They're storing materials for future generations after design for disassembly.
• 16:30 - 17:00 It's worth about 1.4% of the financing pro forma. This project here ... As we built them this, we'd just been given this near Schiphol if you can imagine the scale we're dealing with here. What we're looking at is this massive project where logistics are here, biology is here, and in a way, the conceptual framework is technical nutrition, biological nutrition. This will be a Cradle to Cradle hub for the circular economy. Companies and people can come here. I wanted to look at Pakistan and Haiti when these disasters occurred because we wanted
• 17:00 - 17:30 to help. It occurred to me after hearing from [inaudible 00:17:09] and some friends, they said, "Bill, you've got to take on the housing issue for the super poor." So I started to think, "Well, if we're going to have the first industrial revolution using natural resources, what are we using in the next one where we can afford the materials?" I realized, this is materials. These are sachets and packaging we say, "Oh, we're giving the poor these little packages, isn't that wonderful." And yet, this is it.
• 17:30 - 18:00 Wait a minute. Is that all we've got? So I thought, "Well, let me do some conceptual work. What if these relief situations actually produce capital formation of things that people could use again and start to create communities that are actually viable in the short term but could also be disassembled and used as resources over the long term, and could adapt to local cultures depending on what you want to do with the building systems." We started to look at, if you think about a resource, like plastics from New York, where the films are the bulk of it and they're paying $80 a ton to get rid of it.
• 18:00 - 18:30 I decided my design team would be 6th graders. So, we brought together the children to start to think about designing towns, and I got to tell you, I'd rather live in this than most of these little barracks-like refugee camps, frankly. So we started to think conceptually, what if we could take these materials and people could build a house in one day with their children without tools. We started to think about what the systems could be like that would allow that kind of thing to occur. This house, this has a dignified court, 10 feet tall.
• 18:30 - 19:00 You could add wings to this and surround it and it could become 8 bedrooms, if you want. So we have the children laying out streets and groups for housing. This is just the bulk version of it. IT's very refined now. But even things like that window are just flipping out on a spring so they don't require complex mechanisms. We started looking at using these polymers to make various kinds of plastics, parts the kids could could put together to build houses. We have 8 joints coming together in a flat space.
• 19:00 - 19:30 They just put a rivet and away we go. We have unfolding roofs for smaller buildings. And mushroom insulation believe it or not as we experiment different ways to do things in biosphere and technosphere. The style of the houses will be up to the people. This is building systems. In the United States, we use 2x4s and plywood. What if we had different sized parts. The commercial model is based on an inspiration by this astonishing person, Dr. Venkataswamy in Madurai, India.
• 19:30 - 20:00 He was a cataracts surgeon that realized if we went to mass production, that he could reduce the cost of it all. Instead of $300 lenses, they'd be $2. Instead of $1,900 for cataracts surgery, it could be $20, which is turned out to be. Because of that, he could give it for free to the people who couldn't afford it, and the people who could afford anything would pay $50, $60, $80. That's it. In his legacy of this hospital system, he has given eyesight to 2 million people for free.
• 20:00 - 20:30 This is astonishing. What it does is change the question of commerce itself, from how much can I get for how little I give ... A world of limits, to one of generosity and abundance. How much can we give, for all that we get? A world of generosity, of fairness. As we look at the entropic activity of the burning of the world, those light bulbs you see are fires. They are fires. Mark is right. We can look at alternate systems, of course we can.
• 20:30 - 21:00 We can think about what more good looks like. At the same time, as we celebrate we should remember all of these things here are chemicals. And they'll all come back to the ground. And as we think about rising into the sky, we also have to remember what it means to come down to the ground. When you're grounded in fundamental principles that drive our design, and as we think about
• 21:00 - 21:30 the world, let us re-see the world. Let us glance. Let us see. Let us gaze. Let us think about this beauty. But let's remember what we need to do now is start with our children to think again about the future. So let us think. After we think, let us do. Because it's time for action and I think with these kinds of protocols, we can now get to
• 21:30 - 22:00 work once again. Thank you very much.