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 Page 3 "Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle," McDonough says. "We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle. Let's do a car. For us, the body of a car is a buffalo. The Indians used every last piece of that buffalo. Instead of thirty-five different polymers, we can make it using three or four. Because we're going to get them back, they don't have to be cheap. Instead of paints that contaminate the steel and produce dioxins during recycling, we have paints that are nutrients to the steel." McDonough enjoys speculating, and grows animated as he imagines the technology he might help invent. He suggests that steel could be coded according to its composition and that specially developed lasers placed along the disassembly line would read the codes and sort the automobile's parts into the appropriate recycling tracks. "High chrome goes to high chrome, stainless goes to stainless, copper to copper. A car becomes a car becomes a car." One of MBDC's first projects involved the creation of a 100 percent biodegradable fiber for DesignTex, a New York--based manufacturer of commercial interior fabrics. Creative director Susan Lyons had read about McDonough when the architect--after winning a commission to design an office building in Warsaw--had insisted that the developer plant 150 acres of new forest to offset the greenhouse gases the building would produce. In early 1992 she arranged a meeting with McDonough. "I felt I'd done my homework, told him I'd looked into organic cotton and PET [polyethylene terephthalate]," Lyons remembers. "He said, 'I have three words for you: Waste equals food.'" For Lyons it was an epiphany--and a timely one. The clippings at Rohner Textile AG, the Swiss mill that wove many of DesignTex's fabrics, had just had its trimmings declared hazardous waste by the country's stringent government. Through his connections with Ciba Geigy, Braungart obtained a list of 8,000 chemical substances commonly used in the textile industry. After testing, he eliminated all but 38. For fiber they chose a blend of worsted wool and ramie. Trimmings from the cloth that McDonough helped design were ground into a felt that was used as winter soil covering and, as it decayed, mulch on nearby Swiss farms. The water leaving the Rohner Textile factory after filtering through the cloth was so clean--cleaner than the drinking water going into the factory--that Swiss inspectors thought their equipment had malfunctioned when they first analyzed it. McDonough's most recent collaboration with DesignTex was a totally recyclable polyester that was first presented this April at EnvironDesign 5. When Nike wanted to examine the life cycle of its athletic shoes, they turned to MBDC for help in replacing questionable compounds found in the materials they used. The company took its most popular rubber sole--a compound used in approximately 20 percent of its shoes--and developed an alternative nontoxic material, which will be introduced this fall. In the next three years Nike hopes to incorporate additional ecologically friendly compounds into 60 percent of its product line. "We're making choices that go far beyond compliance with what's legal," says Darcy Winslow, general manager of sustainable business opportunities at Nike. "We are asking whether you can reutilize this material. How should we replace the chemicals we no longer want to use? We're starting up a dialogue with our suppliers, defining what we want from leather, from foam, from polymers." McDonough's greatest single project will undoubtedly be the Rouge River plant for Ford. He and his team of designers have already drafted plans for a 450,000-square-foot habitat roof, which along with a porous parking lot and surrounding wetlands will retain storm-water runoff for three days, purifying the water of toxic compounds before it trickles into the river. The water-management system is expected to cost $13 million, less than a third the estimated cost of a chemical-water remediation system. But McDonough and Braungart may leave an even more important legacy at the Michigan automobile manufacturer, with innovations in the ways vehicles are designed, manufactured, and dismantled: Steel to steel. Plastic to plastic. Products of consumption--tires, brake pads, fiuids, fuel--releasing beneficial substances into the environment instead of toxins like asbestos and antimony. Products of service--steel, plastics, glass--melted down and reincarnated at the same level of service, or even higher. "We're not interested in acceptable levels--in minimal impact," McDonough says, his words hypnotic, like a Buddhist chant, lulling his listeners into a state of wordless comprehension. "We're not interested in being less bad. We're interested in being 100 percent good. We don't want to minimize waste--we want to eliminate the idea of waste. Imagine an automobile plant that is 100 percent powered by solar energy, or that even produces excess energy. Imagine a motorcycle made of magnesium powered by electricity produced by wind power. Ride the wind! How's that for marketing? Imagine waste that is delightful. Imagine brake pads in cars and shoe soles and cookware that produce children's health--and not cancer or Alzheimer's. Imagine a car that is alive--that poops--that leaves cylinders of solid nitrogen behind it that can be used as fertilizer in the field. That's not minimal, that's fecund. Now that's interesting." |
