In 1991, American architect William McDonough met German chemist Michael Braungart in New York. The occasion was the opening of the American office of EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency), the research institute Braungart had founded in Hamburg. Both were looking for the answer to the same question: what do everyday products consist of, and where do they end up after use?
McDonough came to that question as an architect. In 1984 the Environmental Defense Fund asked him to design its headquarters with healthy indoor air, and he discovered that even manufacturers rarely knew what their building materials contained. Braungart came to the same question as a chemist. As former head of chemistry at Greenpeace, he had seen how rarely anyone checked the composition of a product or where it went after use.
Together they named the flaw in the industrial model known as ‘cradle to grave’: dig up raw materials, make a product, use it briefly, then dump or burn it. Even the greenest companies mostly ran that same model with less energy, less water and fewer toxins. The pair called this ‘doing less bad’. A factory that halves its pollution is still polluting, only more slowly.
So what does doing good look like?
A cherry tree drops thousands of blossoms every spring, and each of them feeds the soil. McDonough and Braungart wanted every material to behave like that blossom, as food for something new, within one of two cycles. In the biological cycle, cotton, wool and other natural materials return safely to the earth. In the technical cycle, synthetics and metals return to the factory, where they are recycled into new products of equal quality, again and again. Substances that fit neither cycle, such as PVC, PFAS and carcinogens, must make way for safer alternatives.
And synthetic yarns?
They belong to the technical cycle: after use, they go back to the manufacturer to be spun into new yarn of the same quality. Anything that wears away during use, such as a shoe sole or the fibres a garment sheds in the wash, inevitably ends up in nature. McDonough and Braungart therefore argue that those parts should consist of materials nature can break down safely. Our fabrics contain no polyester, polyamide or acrylic.
In 1995 McDonough and Braungart founded McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) to bring these ideas into industry, and in 2005 MBDC launched the Cradle to Cradle certification. In 2010 the pair transferred the certification standard to the independent Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. Certification follows only once an accredited assessor has checked the product and the Institute has approved the assessment, for products ranging from office carpets to denim tailored in Northern Italy.
