William McDonough Quotes

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

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.

Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.

You can never really go wrong if you take nature as an example.

There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.

Resource efficiency is the wrong metric. We should use nature as the measure, using nature's wisdom as a template for our economic systems.

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.

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

For architecture, nature provides only indications and analogies, not models to imitate.

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.

An ecological approach to the economy is about having enough, not having more.

The future will belong to the nature-smart...Th e more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

Nature is a tenacious recycler, every dung heap and fallen redwood tree a bustling community of saprophytes wresting life from the dead and discarded, as though intuitively aware that there is nothing new under the sun. Throughout the physical world, from the cosmic to the subatomic, the same refrain resounds. Conservation: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.

The flaw is the business plan - digging up and burning way more carbon than physics says we can deal with. So, I suppose it's some kind of mid-point between writing them nice letters asking them to stop and figuring out a way to take down the entire system- which I don't have any idea how to do.

I'm willing to engage or indulge real ideas, but if we don't do something [about global warming], we're all going to die! What's it going to take, a big f--ing disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

Up to that time I never realized that I possessed any particular gift of discovery, but Lord Rayleigh, whom I always considered as an ideal man of science, had said so and if that was the case, I felt that I should concentrate on some big idea.

The throwaway economy that has been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed for the junk heap of history.

Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.

The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and left out there. It's natural. It's as natural as the ocean water is.

We simulated the predator with livestock and the perennial grassland returned. Just put the whole back, and there it was. You'll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.