William McDonough Quotes

We can't think in terms of designing products that we throw over the wall to customers, but instead, we need to design products that are upgradable and maintainable and that can be mined for materials and components that can be reused.

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.

If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

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?

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.

I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?

Our entire economy is based on waste. We produce stuff we don’t need… How far is this going to go? I have a 5 word answer for you: Zero waste equals zero commerce.

Having one foot in design and the other in sustainable and social projects, I hear this question quite often: 'Why does the world need another chair?' My answer is that the world needs another chair/bicycle/car or any new product for that matter, like the world needs another book.

Single-use wearables are tough to sustain from a user perspective.

Philips is committed to the circular economy and is applying its principles throughout the organization. We are redesigning our products and looking at ways to capture their residual value.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

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.

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.

There is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place.

One man's trash is another man's treasure is a third man's raw materials for their planet-buster earthquake machine.

I come from garbage.

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

My father was in the paper recycling business back before they called it recycling.

Plastics, as a material, are very nasty, but as an alternative to, let's say, a brick, which seems really natural, they start to look pretty good. They're very low energy to produce, very lightweight to transport and construct. That's why they're so popular.

As a group, we want to follow good and green strategy. Setting targets is one element of that. The second part is to design products which meet environmental goals.

Loudspeakers should be made to be destroyed and... disposable.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.