William McDonough Quotes
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If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.
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Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.
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Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.
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How do we love all the children of all species for all time?
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Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.
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So when you see a regulation against lead, because lead is a bad in a regulators mind, what does that mean? You are not telling us what is good, you are just tell us what you don't want, not what you do want.
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Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.
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If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.
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If you don't like carbon, if you want to be zero carbon, then you might as well shoot yourself, dry up and blow away because you are carbon.
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We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.
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Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.
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If design is the first signal of human intention.
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Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.
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We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.
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It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.
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It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.
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Honor commerce as the engine of change.
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If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.
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All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.
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The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
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Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place
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This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.
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Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."
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To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.