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The Next Industrial Revolution

By Laurine Brown, PhD, MPH

As the page turns on the New Year, some of us are resolving to exercise, cut sweets, and simplify. But William McDonough, architect and author of "The Next Industrial Revolution," is setting out with grand intentions. He's challenging us to redesign the way we do business here on earth.

Named a "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine, McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart are helping businesses-- like The Gap, Nike, Ford Motor Company, Herman Miller, Design Tech-- be environmentally good, not just less bad. They're designing "environmentally intelligent" buildings that make more energy than they use, non-toxic compostable upholstery fabric, and cars, carpets and non-toxic shoes that are infinitely recyclable, returning to the same industry from whence they came.

The First Industrial Revolution gave us a wealth of material goods and services while raising our standard of living. But perpetuating the vitality of forests, rivers, oceans, air, soil and animals was not part of the agenda. No, we didn't intend to create radioactive plutonium, endocrine disruption, global warming, an ozone hole, polluted rivers, species extinction, or toxic mother's milk. But we own these tragedies as part of our defacto plan.

It's time to clarify our intentions. It's time for a new design.

The model for the Next Industrial Revolution may be in our own backyard--nature. Nature has been highly industrious, astonishingly productive, creative and effective for 4 billion years. And it does all this without mortgaging it's home. Why can't we?

Three simple principles of nature guide McDonough into the Next Industrial Revolution, as he helps transform businesses to a more sustainable design. First, "Waste equals food." We must eliminate the whole concept of waste by putting things in closed cycles. What is waste at one phase of production is food at another. Take a cherry tree. After exploding with blossoms eager to germinate offspring, the flowers fall to the ground, becoming nutrients for the soil. No waste stays waste. And it runs on pure sunlight.

In contrast, waste from human industry is not "food" at all. In fact, it's often poison. But modeling nature, many products can be designed to decompose into soil after use. For example, most packaging (50% of the solid waste stream) should be compostable. There's no need for shampoo bottles, toothpaste tubes, and yogurt cartons to last decades (even centuries) or longer than what came inside them.

Working with Design Tech, McDonough and colleagues created a compostable upholstery fabric so safe one could eat it. After rejections from 60 chemical companies they found one European company willing to subject their dyes and other chemicals to testing for carcinogens, heavy metals, endocrine disruptors and other toxins. Of 8,000 chemicals tested only 38 were deemed safe. But that was enough to create an entire line of beautiful fabric so environmentally intelligent the mill fabric trimmings can mulch nearby gardens. And the water leaving the mill is as clean as the water going in. Now that's progress.

Synthetic products that don't biodegrade should be designed to return infinitely to the manufacturer for reformulating, instead of making trash. The world's largest carpet company, Interface is adopting this concept with a carpet designed for complete recycling. They essentially lease the product, providing a carpet service. When a customer wants to replace a carpet, the manufacturer takes it back, providing a new one. The old carpet is used to create products of equal or higher quality, capturing valuable materials that would be otherwise landfilled. Imagine having a computer service that would provide you with an upgrade while revamping your outdated computer. Let's start asking.

The second principle is "Respect diversity." While nature banks on diversity, our current industrial designs honor homogeneity. McDonald's looks the same in Bloomington as in Bangkok. Instead of one-size-fits-all solutions, designs should respect regional, cultural, and material uniqueness of a place. They should be flexible, allowing for changes in the needs of people and communities. For example, office buildings could be converted to apartments as needs shift.

The third principle guiding the Next Industrial Revolution is "Use solar energy." Nature runs on sunlight. We should too. But human systems now rely on torching fossil fuels, mortgaging in a single year what took one hundred thousand years of compressed organic growth and sunlight to make. Today even the most advanced building in the world is a kind of steamship. We're still sitting in stuffy darkness, polluting our surroundings, burning heirlooms of ancient sunlight while ignoring the contemporary sunlight streaming in every window and the fresh air only a crack away.

With McDonough's help, Oberlin College in Ohio has designed a remarkable building that mimics the nourishing cycles of nature. Powered by sunlight, it makes more energy than it uses. It treats its wastewater on-site with a lovely "Living Machine" garden created by John Todd. Students with chemical sensitivities can breath better here than in their own homes. And it sits landscaped in handsome hardwood forests and woodland ponds native to the area.

Another project, a Herman Miller furniture factory, won Business Week's award for America's best business building design. "We gave everybody fresh air and daylight. They wear aloha shirts and make furniture and performance is up 24%. Go figure…" muses McDonough. The building costs were recovered in only 6 months of profits. "Why are we designing buildings?" McDonough asks. "For the building? Or for the people?"

Unlike the popular eco-efficiency buzzword whose "make do with less" framework limits the creativity and productiveness of humankind, McDonough seeks to embrace our industriousness. He proposes that the raging debate between commerce and environmentalists should not be "growth vs no growth". Rather, isn't the real question "What do you want to grow?" Wouldn't we rather grow prosperity, not ignorance-- health, not sickness? We should celebrate our natural abundance, he says, leaving behind bigger footprints. Footprints like wetlands.

Let's start walking.

Sources: "The Next Industrial Revolution" by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in The Atlantic Monthly October 1998, in Voices of the Bioneers Letter Spring 2001, and on video from Earthome Productions 2001. Also, Biomimicry by Janine Benyus 1997.

January 2002