William McDonough Quotes

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.

If anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

Sustainability takes forever. And that's the point.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

Design is inherently optimistic. That is its power.

Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

I think as designers we realize design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence.

It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.

Honor commerce as the engine of change.

How do we love all the children of all species for all time?

If design is the first signal of human intention.

We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

I just think it is so delightful to see people, let their elbows free. I think the exuberance of it all is really exciting to me. It's a signal of the abundance of diversity and creative expression.

I am working right at both the levels- with the most wealthy clients in the world, but also the poorest. I spend half my time designing for people that have nothing.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

In planetary terms, we're all downstream.

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

All these corporate reports say they want zero carbon. Well that is ridiculous, because you are not telling us what you are, you are telling us what you are not.

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.

The problem I have with carbon as a bad thing issue, is that people go out and say they want to be zero carbon. You see it everywhere.

I'd so much rather have exciting architecture that causes one to stop, breathe, and reflect on the potential of the human mind, the craft, and exploring things.

I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.

You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.

We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.

It's going to sound strange probably. But I really like Frank Gehry's works.

If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.