Festival Keynote - William McDonough

Cradle to Cradle has five fundamental conditions:

1.Material Health - In biological & technical metabolisms.

2. Circular Economy - Material reutilisation & continuous assets.

3. Renewable Energy - Clean energy & restorative carbon balances.

4. Water Stewardship - Clean water in production & use cycles.

5. Social Fairness - Shared abundance.

I’ve been a designer for many years - I’m 71 and I’ve been designing since I was 21. I was born in Japan after the 2nd World War, and it was at college when I started thinking about design. I was reflecting on my childhood and I couldn’t understand why people would try to kill each other and how a city could disappear in seconds. I was in an Ivy League university asking these questions and I ended up taking International Relations - only to find out that detente and mutually assured destruction were driving so much of the political agenda. And I wondered about how we can destroy a city so quickly, when building is so slow.

I realised I wasn’t going to be very good at international relations, so I decided to go into the arts and do creative work. I thought if I ever do work as an architect I’m gonna design buildings like trees and I thought about what a tree can do, like sequestering carbon, emitting oxygen. All the zero emissions talk conversation is about carbon and things that are damaging, but what about good emissions like fresh water or oxygen? It’s not simple. It’s about qualification not just quantification. So let’s emit good things, sequester things we want to sequester. That’s when I decided I wanted to build like trees.

Then we had the energy crisis in 1973. I remember thinking I have to design a solar powered building and I want to do something in Ireland, the place of my ancestors. I was working on this idea at Yale when a famous professor came by. He said, “What are you doing?” and I answered that I was working

on a solar heated house for Ireland. “Young man,” he said, “solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.” So I proceededbecause Vitruvius seemed to think that it did! - and I went to Ireland to experiment. I built it by hand, working with local craftspeople, and it was an amazing experience - not easy, but great - to connect those ideas of the Sun, Earth and humidity. When energy from the sun meets the dead rock with water, and we get soil, we get humus, and when we get humus we get humans - the word human is a derivation of the word humus, we are soil people. It’s also the root of the word humility, which means to be grounded.

After graduation, one of the first buildings I designed that got a lot of attention was competition I won for a skyscraper masterplan and tower in Warsaw. The idea was that they could have the the building, but we also calculated how much carbon it would release to construct and operate the building. I worked out that we would need 10 square miles of trees to offset the building, so my idea was to say they can have the building but must plant the trees. This was in 1989 and people thought it was a bit odd but we priced it at $150,000.

I also worked on a competition entry for a daycare centre in Frankfurt. We explained that it was a negative entropy building and order out of chaos for the children. It would be solar powered, children can operate it with shades and shutters that can move, it would have food growing on the roof, connection to the underground to create stable geothermal temperatures, it would have shutters in the

skylights to let in winter sun but block it in summer, and a laundry for the parents with solar powered cleaning while they wait for their children. Another project was a forest centre in Louisville, Kentucky, where we use old bourbon vats. It was a building made of wood - a building that was a tree in a forest - with a roof covered with plants, which is solar powered, and purified water. It did all things trees do.

We evolved this design process into what we called cradle to cradle, which has become the circular economy. In 2002 I wrote the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things with Michael Braungart. The idea was to look at the world through biological nutrition and technical nutrition, two metabolisms, and we would design things to be safe for soil and to work in cycles of resourcefulness. It was a fundamental way to look at the world, not just make stuff, take stuff, throw it away, but really develop the base of circular economies.

We designed a whole office complex in the Netherlands this way, the first circular economy real estate development. All the materials we considered were cradle to cradle and even certified by our protocol that had been put into a nonprofit, independent certification organisation. We started to look at buildings as material banks to think about the idea of design for this disassembly and of cataloguing all the materials in a building. Today we can use RFID tags - radio frequency

identification at very tiny scales so we can mark every component and know where it originated and what it can be used for in the future. So a building can become a material bank for future generations.

We’ve even designed fabrics, looking at the 8,000 chemicals in the textile trade and eliminating 4,362 based on our criteria - helping to reduce endocrine disruption, cancer, and birth defects. Working with chemists we developed lists of materials and we could create fabric with 38 chemicals instead of 256 and the water coming from the Swiss factory was so clean that it can be reused. We have been working on these methods with companies in India and Bangladesh and it’s exciting because they have factories which are renewably powered, have clean water, people are treated with dignity and grace, and you end up with very cost effective production.

From 2014 to 2016 I was the inaugural Chair of the World Economic Forum’s MetaCouncil on the Circular Economy and we brought these ideas into commerce, not just for one company, but for all companies, all industries, and at all scales. It is like a fractal, self-similar at every scale, so we can

work at the molecule level, product level, building scale, or with regions - we can even go planetary. It was exciting to look at it as a design philosophy. It’s a unified philosophy - but it’s obvious and simple, it’s nature. Nature has astonishing power if we think of it as intentional and design, nature is beautiful and knows how to find beauty by just being.

Now we can have a circular carbon economy. I wrote a protocol for the 2020 G20. The idea is to look at carbon within a diagram of a circular economy, considering carbon as both material and fuel. We burn it, but we could make things from it. Instead of just saying “carbon is bad, we need zero emissions,” we’re could say “carbon is the source of life, we design with carbon.” We can take hydrocarbons and think of them as hydrogen and as carbon, and we’re working on experiments now which follow ideas of using petroleum, petrochemicals, and hydrocarbons as a production of hydrogen. Then we have carbon, but instead of making the carbons a fugitive problem in the atmosphere we can have living carbon, durable carbon, and stop making fugitive carbon.

There are also exciting design ideas coming based on the idea we must remove carbon from the atmosphere now, not just reduce emissions. We can create this regenerative Biosphere, a cycle of life powered by the sun. We also need a circular economy formed of our technical materials going back to human technology, which I call it the circular Technosphere. We design things for human purposes, intention, and use, but they’re not living things - so we have to think about design language because we talk of lifecycle assessments when discussing sourcing and disposition. But nature doesn’t have resources, it has sources - and it’s our job to turn them into resources to use again and again and again in a circular Technosphere. If they can return to nature, then they become part of its regenerative recreation.

I’m so excited about this. It requires immense humility because we don’t want to do geoengineering, but we can think about restoration, regeneration, reuse, and recycling. It’s time to to put down our old tools and take up new tools. As designers we know this.

William McDonough, Architect & Sustainable Development Designer

William McDonough is a globally recognised leader in sustainable design and development. He co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002), widely recognised as a seminal text of both the sustainability and the Circular Economy design movements. McDonough advises leaders on ESG, sustainability, Circular Economy, and design of products and facilities through McDonough Innovation. He is also an architect with William McDonough + Partners, a firm known for having designed many notable landmark buildings of the sustainable architecture movement. Through McDonough’s third firm, MBDC, he created the Cradle to Cradle Certified® Products Program. Cradle to Cradle Certified® is an independent, science-based, third-party, multiattribute product standard.