William McDonough Quotes

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.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

By fundamentally changing how we design the places and systems that enable our daily lives, we can slash emissions way beyond the immediate carbon savings - because our own personal emissions are just the tip of a vast iceberg of energy and resources consumed far from our view.

We need to be both conscious and competent to design products that emulate nature's life cycles, making sure that they endure and are either recycled or absorbed.

It's like recycling: selling old clothes to help make new ones.

I imagine a future with no waste; material innovations have already become exponentially more vast, and I do think the future needs to be cradle to cradle. If designed properly, one product could be used for many years before needing to be recycled, or its components reused.

Waste does not exist in nature because ecosystems reuse everything that grows in a never-ending cycle of efficiency and purpose.

Like all major transitions in human history, the shift from a linear to a circular economy will be a tumultuous one. It will feature heroes and pioneers, naysayers and obstacles, and moments of victory and doubt. If we persevere, however, we will put our economy back on a path of growth and sustainability.

There is no such thing as waste. It is just a question of whether we know how to use something or not.

We should make things that people don't want to throw away.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Turning every business into an environmental industry will involve applying new principles...first, we need to make more with less...second, we need to design out waste...third, we must begin to decarbonise our energy supply

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

Why aren't we investing more in alternate tech? The Saudi Arabians are, Scottish Power is. I was just there. Could it be that we're counting on the oil going on forever and ever and ever and us having all of it and getting very rich?

I think there is a way to do things right to tread lightly on the world

I think everyone should have a personal mission to leave the Earth a better place for them having lived in it and let Earth then take it from there.

People of conscience in our leadership in Washington have been scared off by the right and the fossil fuel lobbies. They won't even use the term "sustainability" or "climate change" in an energy bill, which is ludicrous on its face. It completely ignores the elephant in the room that we're all dealing with. The average American doesn't even believe climate change is real, they think it's all a hoax.

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.

I think the environmental movement is the biggest people's movement in the world. Unfortunately, our governments and corporations haven't responded accordingly to protect our planet's natural resources.

I only started to understand the concept of "environmental protection" 14 years ago. I was an ambassador for a charity event, and the staff told me that the consumption of disposable chopsticks in China, per year, could result in the devastation of unimaginable acres of forest.

So many people think you have to be rich and famous to really create an impact, and it's just not true. Especially when it comes to environmentalism.

Dreher is correct in saying that traditionalist conservatives also have been conservationists...I think most conservatives should agree that this is an area we need to think more about.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting.

Support renewable energy. Recycle. Reuse. Restore. Replenish.

I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal - in the same way that women's rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part of a compassionate view of the world.