[Scpg] Bill McDonough is calling for an industrial eco- revolution.

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Radical with a green blueprint

Bill McDonough is calling for an industrial eco- revolution. For once, 
industry is listening. Terry Slavin reports

Terry Slavin
Observer

Sunday January 27, 2002

Bill McDonough makes for an unlikely revolutionary. The 50-year-old's 
boyish looks and signature bow tie suggest New England preppy, not factory 
firebrand.

But McDonough, America's foremost green architect, isn't sitting in a 
cunningly converted warehouse in Greenwich Village designing pretty, 
energy-efficient buildings. He and his partner, the radical German chemist 
Dr Michael Braungart, are redrawing the industrial process itself, 
standard-bearers for what they call the 'next industrial revolution'.

'Design is the first signal of human intention,' says McDonough, who was in 
London recently to address a Greenpeace conference on business and the 
environment. 'At this point in history we have to decide just what is our 
intention. As we see environmental tragedies in the making we can't just 
say to ourselves "it's not my problem. I didn't cause it" any more. These 
tragedies become our de facto plan - the things that happen because we 
didn't have a plan.'

McDonough's plan, which in 1999 earned him Time magazine's sobriquet 'Hero 
for the Planet' and in 1996 the first and only Presidential Award for 
Sustainable Development, is to apply nature's cycles to industry. 
Industrial landscapes should mimic as much as possible natural landscapes, 
with grass roofs to purify air and retain stormwater, and interiors that 
are flooded with natural light.

But the truly revolutionary bit is that, as in nature, factories should not 
produce waste as their byproducts, but 'food', or 'nutrients' for other 
industrial processes, a cyclical model he and Braungart dub 'cradle to cradle'.

What most of us think as 'green' design is not green at all, McDonough 
maintains. Eco-efficiency, the credo of reduce, reuse and recycle to which 
most forward-thinking companies now sub scribe, will never deliver anything 
but an illusion of change. 'It is still based on the one-way, linear, 
cradle-to-grave manufacturing line, where things are created and eventually 
discarded, usually in an incinerator or a landfill,' he says.

At first, McDonough appears an unlikely hit in the boardroom. An 
unabashedly sentimental orator, he enthuses about nature's 'fecundity' and 
talks about buildings that 'attract songbirds and [are] delightful places 
for people to work'. Yet he also sees commerce as critical to progress, and 
conflicts with the environment as design problems that can be overcome.

To him, government regulations imposed to rein companies in are a signal 
that the design has failed. 'It's not a question of growth or no growth,' 
he adds. 'It's what do you want to grow? Let's grow prosperity, not 
poverty; intelligence, not stupidity; health, not sickness. The filters of 
the future will be on our heads, instead of on the end of the pipe.'

Some very big companies indeed are listening. When the environmentally 
minded Bill Ford, great-grandson of Henry, became chairman of Ford Motor 
Company in January 1999, McDonough was invited to meet him within a 
fortnight. As McDonough tells it, his allotted half-hour session lasted 
most of the day.

Late on, Ford led him to his new office overlooking the 600-acre Rouge 
site, the 85-year-old assembly plant where the car company first produced 
the Model T. It is now a mostly derelict industrial wasteland. 'Bill said, 
"Do you think you could apply those principles to this place?",' says 
McDonough, 'and a huge lump came into my throat.'

A few months later, Ford announced its $2 billion plan to clean up the 
Rouge - and awarded McDonough and Partners of Charlottesville, Virginia, 
the commission. The first phase, which will take two to three years, is to 
rebuild the engine plant and paint shop and create a new state-of-the-art 
454,000 sq ft assembly plant. The complex will be topped by the trademark 
grass roof, which traps up to three days' worth of rainfall and absorbs 
carbon dioxide emissions. According to McDonough, the stormwater management 
aspect of the design was the real seller for the company.

'Ford had been looking at a $48 million liability to put in a traditional 
stormwater management system. Ours costs $13m. They saved $35m and got the 
landscaping for free. It was approved by the board in a minute.'

'This is not environmental philanthropy,' Bill Ford said when he announced 
the project. 'It is sound business, which for the first time balances the 
business needs of auto manufacturing with ecological and social concerns in 
the redesign of a brownfield site. This new facility lays the groundwork 
for a model of twenty-first century sustainable manufacturing.'

McDonough has designed a similarly environmentally friendly office complex 
for Gap in San Francisco and for Nike Europe's head office outside 
Amsterdam. But it is redesigning industrial processes, how companies make 
things, that excites McDonough most.

McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, the company he founded with 
Braungart, takes him deep into the realms of chemistry and heavy industry.

One of the pair's first projects was to design a completely biodegradable 
fabric for use in commercial interiors. The fibre was made of wool and 
ramie, a flax-like natural material. Of 8,000 chemicals commonly used in 
the textile industry to dye and finish fabric, all but 38 were eliminated, 
yet they were able to create fabrics in every colour except black. It is 
said that when Swiss environmental inspectors visited the Rohner Textile 
factory they thought their instruments were broken - the water coming out 
of the mill was as clean as that going in.

More recent work has been for Nike, the US sportswear manufacturer which 
has been a whipping boy for anti-globalisation protesters over working 
conditions in its Asian factories. The company has been undergoing a quiet 
revolution in a bid to redeem its battered brand.

Working with MBDC, Nike went back to the drawing board on how it made its 
shoes. It has converted to water-based adhesives, cutting solvent usage by 
90 per cent, and developed an alternative non-toxic rubber sole for its 
trainers. Where Nike has led, other sports manufacturers will follow, says 
McDonough.

Similarly, at Ford, the transformation is expected to go much further than 
the assembly plant and paint shop. Bill Ford and McDonough have been in 
discussions with 500 suppliers about how Ford's cars can be designed so 
that they can be disassembled and their parts taken for other uses at the 
end of their working lives - the holy grail of the zero waste philosophy.

Tim O'Brien, Ford's head of environment, sounds a note of caution, 
emphasising that any change in how Ford produces vehicles will have to 
punch its weight on the balance sheet. 'Our company has been, and always 
will be, in favour of things that make environmental and social sense as 
well as business sense,' he says. '[McDonough] has shown us that there are 
plenty of opportunities for those ideas to come together.'

This is the kind of tribute that McDonough relishes. 'Michael and I 
consider ourselves radical and yet we're working deep inside of commerce,' 
he says. Unlike environmental activists, he adds, 'we're not in the shrill 
zone. We're on the long, low hum of getting things done. We just have to 
keep our heads down and keep slogging.'

terry.slavin at observer.co.uk


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