No one has migrated from the fringes of enviro-geek design to the soft spotlight of pop culture as gracefully as McDonough. Long before the word "sustainability" was part of the average CEO's vocabulary -- and before, as McDonough puts it, "LEED [the green building standard] was even a twinkle in somebody's eye" -- he had begun postulating a third industrial revolution, one with the potential to transform how goods are made, cities are built, and literally everything is broken down and reused. His radical cradle-to-cradle philosophy demands that every product be designed for disassembly at the end of its lifetime, either returning harmlessly to the soil or going back into a "closed-loop industrial cycle" to be reused. With mainstream America beginning to see that we may have a planetary problem on our hands, McDonough has come to be seen as both a prophet and a savior. If only it were that simple.
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As someone who believes that "commerce is the engine of change," as he puts it, McDonough has never confined his ambition to the high plains of principle. The virtue of his cradle-to-cradle idea is that it offers a virtuous result -- infinite abundance with no waste -- through an unabashedly commercial channel, namely manufacturing. If he could establish himself in that chain as the arbiter of clean products, there is no limit to what it might yield -- for everyone. "The faster and larger our business grows," he told me, "the better the world gets."
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McDonough did begin taking steps several years ago to formalize cradle to cradle as an official certification, essentially a LEED-style rating system for product design. He developed 35 criteria -- from toxicity to renewable power to social fairness -- and began charging companies between $5,000 and $20,000 per certification. Every time he certifies a product, whether as simple as a diaper or as complex as a new office cubicle, he records each of its ingredients' "cradle to cradleness" in a master database. Ultimately, his plan is for the data to become a sort of Human Genome Project for chemicals.
And my response to the original post:
While I feel that he has a right to profit off his work or inventive patenting like anyone else for any other work product, I really feel like if the spirit of his work is in the capacity of benefiting the marketplace and also the world, he may need to step back and note that frankly, many of his ideas cannot come to fruition on a mass scale if they are financially infeasible for a majority of the public/world/market. Maybe if this were 1970 and he were starting out with this sort of mindset he could get farther on his royalty desires, but now that there is an actual urgency, he really stands to jump the shark, if you will, on his importance. I am typically as capitalist as the next pig, and don't want to take away from all of the wonderful and historically meaningful things that he has done, but this just seems highly unrealistic and ethically hypocritical point for him to push not only in the current economic crisis but also in the global crisis.
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