I’ve been listening to an MP3 recording of a lecture delivered by William McDonough to HP Employees at Roseville (California), where HP operates a massive recycling plant. It’s been a year since the first time I heard this talk, and there seems so much more I’m getting out of it with this second listening.
McDonough has a very systems approach to looking at environmental sustainability, living systems and the physics and chemistry that go into them. There’s a good amount of science in his talk, and there’s a lot of sense and wisdom there as well. An architect by profession, he was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s heroes for our planet in 1999.
You can watch and listen to a talk he gave in Feb 2005, on the TedTalks website - this is the link to the video, which runs for about 20 mins.
If you enjoy the video and want more, pick up a copy of “Cradle to Cradle”, a book McDonough co-wrote with Michael Braungart. This book is printed not on paper, but an easily recyclable plastic. It looks just like a normal paperback, but it’s not cheap - I bought my copy for S$50 at Books Kinokuniya. (actually, a thoughtful friend picked it up for me - thanks, Hui Ching!). If you live in Singapore, you’re welcome to borrow my copy. This is the blurb from the back of the book:
Waste Equals Food
Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset, so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. They can be conceived as “biological nutrients” that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Or they can be “technical nutrients” that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed loop industrial cycles, rather than being “recycled” - really, downcycled - into low grade materials and uses.
Here are a couple of quotes from the talk to HP that I find most memorable:
Imagine this design assignment.
Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, acrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes color with the seasons and self replicates.
I’m a big fan of clean nuclear power.
I’m especially fond of nuclear fusion.
I think we should spend a trillion $ trying to capture the benefits of nuclear fusion immediately.
And I thank God that we’ve already got our nuclear reactor exactly where we need it, 93 million miles away. It’s 8 minutes. It’s wireless.
