Environmental Architect Celebrates Abundance, Green Factories, and the Next Industrial Revolution

Question: Your firms emphasize that growth is possible without polluting the environment. Can you elaborate on that?

McDonough: We want to follow nature's laws, and in that context growth is good. A tree that grows is good. A child that grows is good. And yet humans worry about growth as if it's a negative thing. That's because most things humans are growing right now are presenting problems, such as asphalt. Businesses say we must have growth to maintain commerce. But environmentalists say we have to stop growth because it's destroying the world. That's because growth is not following nature's laws. But what if growth were good? What if a factory that makes textiles also purifies the water and makes oxygen? So the argument is not between growth and no growth. The argument is about what do you want to grow. Do you want sickness or health? Poverty or prosperity? As Michael Braungart points out, with every case of leukemia we create something like nine jobs. Is that our job-creation program?

For us, it's not a choice of being bad or less bad; we want to just do good things that people and nature delight in. We want to be fabulous at everything -- fabulous socially, economically, and ecologically. We're not looking for more stringent government regulations. For us, a regulation is a sign of some kind of design failure. We believe that everything from cars to computers to urban centers can be designed so that they never pollute. We don't want to minimize waste -- we want to eliminate the entire concept of waste. Imagine an automotive plant that is 100 percent powered by solar energy, or that even produces excess energy. Imagine factories that require no waste water treatment because they cycle it around and around cleanly. So we're celebrating good growth if we follow nature's laws. That's our fundamental strategy.

Q: How is your philosophy being applied in your plan to transform the Ford Motor Company's aging River Rouge facility into a model of 21st century sustainable manufacturing?

McDonough: The River Rouge plant was the first huge-scale, vertically integrated industrial facility. It was considered state-of-the-art when Henry Ford introduced automated assembly-line technology there in 1927. It was sort of the ground zero of the Industrial Revolution. Iron ore and coal came in at one end and finished cars came out the other. Raw material in, finished products out. At 1,100 acres (440 hectares), it was one of the largest industrial sites of early 20th century America. By the 1980s, much of the complex was obsolete and contaminated, and today it has all the debris of 80 years of production. And you can imagine what the soil looks like.

Although rebuilding the entire site is a 20-year project, the first phase of the redesign plan -- constructing a new, state-of-the-art assembly plant -- will be completed by 2003. The new factories will be extremely flexible, allowing for inter-changeable platforms so that they can produce different model vehicles and respond to markets much faster. The new buildings will have lots of open space and be full of daylight -- not dark as they are now.

But for the longer-term we want to make the plant sustaining. So it all gets back to the landscape. We're going to try to restore the soil and water to health. It's a restorative act, a healthy act. We want a site that makes oxygen. Right now all it makes is contaminated dust particles. So the new Ford assembly plant will have a 450,000-square-foot (135,000-square-meter) "green" roof, known as the "habitat" roof -- perhaps the largest "living" roof in the world. Consisting of thin layers of absorbent materials, nutrients, and plants, the roof will absorb rain water, trap airborne particles, and insulate the factory -- and the birds will love it too. So instead of rain water hitting a hard surface, the water hits something soft, the water is filtered and purified, and it takes three days to trickle back into the Rouge River. Right now it takes less than 10 minutes to rush back into the river, laden with chemicals and toxic compounds.

The plants also make oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide emissions, and absorb particles to improve the air. So the plants clean the air. And so if a building can act like a tree, imagine an entire city that's like a forest. What would be the quality of the air? What would the temperature be in a city that had gardens all over the roofs instead of black asphalt? It could change the temperature of the city by one or two degrees in the summer and provide cool breezes.

The Ford parking lots are also redesigned to be porous. They are constructed of stones very similar in size so the water is actually absorbed and filters through them. They look like a sponge, but are perfectly flexible and very durable. So the parking lots absorb water -- like a giant reservoir -- and release it slowly into a constructed wetlands that will surround the manufacturing complex, getting purified all along the way. Storm-water swales and retention ponds will also regulate the water flow.

Q: What will this cost the company?

McDonough: The redesigned facilities will actually save Ford money on its energy, waste, and potential environmental compliance costs. The habitat roof, the porous paving, and the habitat wetlands will cost about $13 million. However, they spare Ford from having to spend up to $48 million to build underground pipes and chemical treatment facilities to meet standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). So Ford might be saving as much as $35 million and getting a beautiful landscape in the bargain.

Q: Will other companies be willing to invest millions for similar long-term, intangible benefits?

McDonough: I think any smart chief executive officer (CEO) recognizes that the health, safety, and productivity of their employees are the biggest asset on the company's balance sheet. Keeping people happy and productive can make a huge difference. The Herman Miller furniture factory in Holland, Michigan, that we completed in 1995 is full of daylight and fresh air. It won the first annual Good Design is Good Business Award sponsored by Business Week magazine and the American Institute of Architects. Light monitors on the roof channel streams of sunlight onto the factory floor, and artificial wetlands planted around the facility retain and purify storm-water runoff. It also uses less energy than a normal factory because of the daylight. The productivity of the company went up 25 percent after employees moved into the new building. That increase in productivity is worth $60 million more production per year to Herman Miller. The new building cost $15 million, and they're making significantly greater profit on more production with the same number of happy people. Ask any CEO if she or he would accept over 100 percent annual return on an investment. Every year. That's amazing.

We also designed the Gap corporate campus in San Bruno, California. It's a structure topped with an undulating grass roof and full of daylight. The grass roof catches and filters storm water and provides thermal and acoustic insulation. Roof baffles direct sunlight onto interior spaces. It also features the novel use of raised computer floors throughout an entire building. A system of fans moves air under the floors all night long, picking up cool air. The next day, the concrete slabs of the building are cool from the night before and cool the air being delivered to the people. So we cooled the mass of the building down just like an old hacienda. We didn't have to just pump in energy and use electricity for air conditioning. But we created the same effect using half as much equipment at a third of the cost. The Gap project won Pacific Gas & Electric's special award as one of the most energy efficient new office buildings in California. Other buildings receiving awards for low energy use had very little daylight or fresh air. We provided 100 percent fresh air and daylight to every individual in the Gap facility. We delivered a far superior product for the same price; we just deployed our resources differently.

Q: Can your ideas be applied to the developing world?

McDonough: Absolutely. In fact, I'm the co-chair of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. Ideas for the developing world are the same as here; they involve different technologies for different circumstances. So we're not saying let's bring in our technology, per se, to other cultures. We're simply saying that nature's laws apply to all of us, and we need to find ways to celebrate those laws within the local context.

One of the things we're trying to encourage is micro-solar franchises. We're developing new solar technologies that can be made by the local people in local places. We might offer some young entrepreneurs 500 solar collectors that will make energy. They can use that energy to create a small factory that makes solar collectors. They would be required to give the first collectors they produce to someone else, just as we gave them their first collectors. So there's a multiplier effect. People can make their own solar collectors and start small companies, and then help create new companies that expand quickly. So we're actually working from the ground up.

Q: Can you discuss your idea about changing the way we make things and designing a productive afterlife into materials at the very outset?

McDonough: As long as human activity is so destructive, we all think we have to try to become more efficient, or try to be less bad. But, consider the cherry tree; it is not "efficient". It makes thousands of blossoms just so another tree might germinate. The tree's abundance is useful and safe. After falling to the ground, the blossoms return to the soil and become nutrients for the surrounding environment. Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem. This is why we would prefer to be "effective" instead of efficient. We would like to do the right thing right, not the wrong thing right. "Waste equals food" is the first principle of our next industrial revolution. But human industry, right now, is severely limited because it typically follows a one-way, linear, cradle-to-grave manufacturing line in which things are created and eventually discarded, usually in an incinerator or a landfill. Unlike the waste from nature's work, the waste from human industry is not food at all. In fact, it is often poison.

A few years ago, I teamed up with a German chemist named Michael Braungart, and we created a research firm called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. We believe there are two fundamental metabolisms in the world. One is biological, the other technical. So we think things should be designed to either go back to the soil safely or back to industry. And nothing else should be made. Biological nutrients, for example, should be designed to return to the organic cycle -- to be literally consumed by microorganisms and other creatures in the soil. Most packaging, which makes up about 50 percent of the volume of our solid waste, should be composed of biological nutrients -- materials that can be tossed onto the ground to biodegrade. There is no need for things like shampoo bottles, juice containers, and other packaging to last decades, or even centuries, longer than what came inside them.

So we're working with the German chemical company BASF on a new nylon fiber that's actually truly recyclable. After the fiber is woven into products like carpets, it can be returned to the manufacturer to be remade -- your carpet can be reincarnated every time you redecorate. We also helped a Swiss company, Rohner Textile, create an upholstery fabric so safe one could literally eat it. The fabric is made of ramie and wool -- a mixture of safe, pesticide-free plant and animal fibers. To find safe dyes for the fabric, we considered more than 8,000 chemicals used in the textile industry and eliminated 7,962. The fabric was created using only 38 chemicals. When removed from the frame after a chair's useful life, the fabric and its trimmings will decompose naturally and serve as garden mulch. It was found that the water leaving the Rohner Textile factory after filtering through the cloth during production was as clean as the Swiss drinking water going into the factory.

Q: In light of the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, what do you feel the world can do to advance sustainable development?

McDonough: We need to learn to celebrate the abundance of the world instead of simply bemoaning its limits. There's an abundance of sunshine and water and children. So why don't we celebrate that? And let's find intelligent ways to do that. As long as we only think we're hopelessly overrunning the world, all we worry about are the limits to conventional growth. Forget that. Let's celebrate the growth of good things, like solar energy and healthful food. Let's celebrate human intelligence. From an environmental perspective, it means that we never look at a child being born in India and say, "There's a population problem." Because the second we say something like that human rights cease to exist. So environmentalists, governments, and business people should not just get up and say, "We have a population problem, and we don't have enough resources to go around." They should also get up and say, "How do we love every one of those children?" And that's not the only question we need to ask, because if we begin to honor nature's laws we also want to honor women as equal partners. And as we have seen in case after case, when women are honored in society -- when women are treated equally to men and have an equal opportunity for education -- populations level off, and the population issue becomes something we can all live with.

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