dwell Interview with William McDonough

"Almost exactly a year ago, you were at a very high-profile launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute in San Francisco, with the goal of establishing standards to remove toxic substances from manufacturing. What have you been able to achieve so far?"

What we announced last year is that Michael Braungart and I had decided to gift our certification process to the public. What I've been doing for the last year is working with the protocol of certification to prepare it for the public domain. It's a very, very deep assessment of chemistry, of logistics, of energy, of water, and social fairness and so it's really a quality standard—it's about total quality, not necessarily green standards. It has more to do with life than just "green something." You have logistics and economic and energy and water and people and culture—there's a cultural dimension.

So for the last year we got our scientists and our systems engineers and our advisers working with us to craft what we call version 3. But we can't put it out there unless we've really carefully reviewed it. We have to look at things like nanotechnology and genetic modification, lots of issues that are common with our clients we work with but we haven't had to deal with it in an open environment. We're very close to putting it out to public review and we have other institutes around the world that want to join us and be part of this. We also renamed it after we had the legal hurdles accomplished, it's now the Cradle-to-Cradle Product Innovation Institute.

Read more: http://www.dwell.com/articles/interview-with-bill-mcdonough.html


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