RE: INTERVIEW
Perfect
Everything that is possible demands to exist – Gottfried Leibniz, 1710. Some 300 years later, another German polymath revived this notion, unleashing to the world a new optimism that puts faith in humans as responsible advocates of a better way of making things. In this world there are no “bad” products, wastage or depletion of natural resources, only a logical circular effectiveness which makes constraint and efficiency redundant.
Charlotte Owen talks to Dr. Michael Braungart, co-author of the Hanover Principles, Cradle to Cradle and The Upcycle
18 RETAIL ENVIRONMENT | JUNE 2013
CIRCLES
“Take the right for women to vote. Can you imagine 150 years ago people thought ‘women are not really human’. Compared to that we’re amazingly fast,” begins Professor Dr. Michael Braungart before hurtling into a breathless stream of consciousness on the emergence of a new wasteless industrial revolution.
Braungart is an environmental visionary and activist, author, chemist and philosophical optimist who appears to look with marvel at an evolving society more than capable of becoming sustainable – although he rejects the term, preferring instead to talk in more clear- cut terms of “good” versus “bad”. With his friend and colleague, the architect William McDonough, Braungart is transforming the landscape of design and industry through the Cradle to Cradle movement. First uttered by Swiss architect Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s, Braungart and McDonough popularised the term in their 2002 book “Cradle to Cradle”. Now a global certification standard, C2C products are those that can either be reabsorbed into biological cycles or remade in technical cycles. Any product that doesn’t meet this criteria should become obsolete; they are “unmarketable”, say the duo.
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