Fifty years of ideas, spoken, written, and designed.

Waging Peace · pp. 5–6

McDonough Design Framework™

The Triple Top Line

Enterprises of all kinds can design using the McDonough Design Framework, recognizing all stakeholders, not just shareholders. It is a design tool based on environmental, social, and economic principles connected by coherent governance. The goal is to scrutinize and optimize all values represented by the triangle, to render the information visible, and to encourage constant improvement.

Illustrative questions

Economy · Economy

Are we making a financial profit?

Economy · Social

Are all people earning a living wage?

Economy · Environment

Are we cost-efficient in operation and minimizing ecological burden?

Social · Social

Are all people treated with dignity and respect?

Social · Environment

Are all people working with safe and healthy environments and materials?

Social · Economy

Are all people working together paid the same for the same work?

Environment · Environment

Are we following the laws of nature?

Environment · Economy

Are we providing ecological benefit while doing business?

Environment · Social

Are we enhancing the atmosphere, rivers, etc. for future generations?

Waging Peace · pp. 7–8

Cradle to Cradle Design™

Three principles from nature

In their 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart presented a science-based design framework that eliminates the concept of waste and provides enduring benefits for society, from safe materials and circular economies to clean air, water and energy.

Three principles derived from nature

Everything is a resource for something else

In nature, the "waste" of one system becomes food for another. Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or reutilized as high-quality materials for new products as technical nutrients without contamination.

Use clean and renewable energy

Living things thrive on the energy of current solar income. Similarly, human constructs can utilize clean and renewable energy in many forms, such as solar, wind, geothermal, gravitational energy and other energy systems being developed today, thereby capitalizing on these abundant resources while supporting human and environmental health.

Celebrate diversity

Around the world, geology, hydrology, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling, adapted to locale, yield an astonishing diversity of natural and cultural life. Designs that respond to the challenges and opportunities offered by each place fit elegantly and effectively into their own niches.

Rather than seeking to minimize the harm we inflict, Cradle to Cradle reframes design as a positive, regenerative force, one that creates footprints to delight in, not lament. This paradigm shift reveals opportunities to improve quality, increase value and spur innovation. It inspires us to constantly seek improvement in our designs, and to share our discoveries with others.

Waging Peace · pp. 9–10

From Values to Value™

From quality to quantity

Using a design lens and multi-disciplinary approach, we work with our clients to innovate new systems and solutions for some of the toughest challenges they face. Our process begins with your values.

The sequence

Values

What's your "Compass"?

Principles

Against what fulcrum do you lean your levers of change?

Visions

What does the desirable future look like to you?

Goals

What do you want to achieve that gets you up in the morning?

Strategies

Where do you desire to move the world? What is your plan? What is your lever?

Tactics

What do you do every day to pursue your goals or express your values?

Metrics

How do you measure success? What do you consider statistically significant?

Value

Have you made positive contributions to the world and future generations?

Waging Peace · pp. 11–12

The Five Goods™

A Design Positive Framework™, inspired by Cradle to Cradle

Using the intellectual and practical filters of Cradle to Cradle, design solutions are viewed as an aggregation of nutrient metabolisms, energy and water flows, and cultural and ecological biodiversity. The approach is articulated through five categories of positive development.

Five categories of positive development

Good Materials : Safe, healthy, biological and technical nutrients

Ideally, everything that went into a product would be beneficial not just for the product itself, but also for human and ecological health. Companies wouldn't have to work at reducing harmful inputs because they wouldn't include those inputs to begin with.

Good Economy : Circular, sharing and shared

When companies finish using or reusing a product, they would ideally break it up into valued resources flowing in a continuous loop of natural and human activity. Nothing would get wasted.

Good Energy : Clean and renewable

The goal here is to rely on energy that sustains resources rather than consumes them and/or endangers people. Instead of fossil fuels that take carbon from the ground and release it into the atmosphere, or nuclear power that generates harmful byproducts, companies can use renewable sources that leave the world as well endowed as before.

Good Water : Clean and available

The aspiration is a process that leaves water supplies as good as or better than they were before, ideally at drinking water quality. Each process stage would use only readily available water, and leave that water so clean that it can be continually reused or released for the benefit of the surrounding community or ecosystem.

Good Lives : Safe, creative and dignified

We'd like our economy to be good not just in the materials, but also in how it treats the people who make it function. Ideally it would promote individual human dignity, with safe working conditions and accommodation for family living circumstances. It would also promote fairness in wages and prices.

The Sustainable Development Goals: when companies start from a Five Goods mindset, they can design their products and processes upfront to promote holistic goodness. This approach provides a framework to achieve progress toward all the Sustainable Development Goals.

Waging Peace · pp. 13–14

Achieving Net Positive

The Upcycle

Drawing on a decade of lessons in putting Cradle to Cradle Design™ concepts into practice around the world, McDonough and Braungart's book, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability, Designing for Abundance, published in 2013, presents a persuasive and inspiring argument for moving beyond conventional approaches to sustainability that seek to merely minimize damage to the environment and human health. By adopting Cradle to Cradle values and principles, and seeking continuous improvement, companies are able to direct innovation in a coherent and positive trajectory.

Two trajectories

Eco-Efficient Approach : "Less Bad" trajectory

Reduce carbon; minimize chemicals of concern; energy efficient; reduce water consumption; goal of zero hazards.

Eco-Effective Approach : "More Good" trajectory

Increase positive ingredients; energy positive; improved water quality; increased biodiversity; goal of 100% positive / beneficial products, processes and systems.

The Net-Positive Chart enables many industry sectors, including product manufacturers, to 1) inventory, 2) assess and then 3) optimize products, processes and systems with positive intentions and beneficial goals.

Waging Peace · pp. 15–16

Cradle to Cradle Certified® Product Standard

A comprehensive one-standard solution

Cradle to Cradle Certified Version 4.0 is a comprehensive one-standard solution for addressing the critical sustainability and circularity objectives that define products made for tomorrow. The multi-attribute product standard continues to be developed, maintained and administered by the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, an independent, third-party, not-for-profit organization.

Five assessment categories

Material Health : Safe for humans and the environment

Ensuring materials are safe for humans and the environment.

Product Circularity : Enabling a circular economy

Enabling a circular economy through regenerative products and process design.

Clean Air & Climate Protection : Protecting clean air and climate

Protecting clean air, promoting renewable energy, and reducing harmful emissions.

Water & Soil Stewardship : Safeguarding clean water and healthy soils

Safeguarding clean water and healthy soils.

Social Fairness : Respecting human rights

Respecting human rights and contributing to a fair and equitable society.

Waging Peace · pp. 17–18

The Circular Economy Concept

Inspired by Cradle to Cradle

As a model for design at all scales from the molecule to cities and regions, Cradle to Cradle is inspired by nature's principles where waste equals food, clean renewable energy is utilized and diversity is celebrated. The Circular Economy is a resourceful economic system and innovation engine, providing benefits to society in the present and the future. It is designed to continuously recirculate clean materials, energy, water and human ingenuity. In essence, the Circular Economy puts the 're' back in resources. While the Circular Economy is the critical part of the quantification of material flows, Cradle to Cradle calls for a safe then circular qualification of materials, processes and practices first, moving from linear to regenerative 'circular' systems of biological and technical nutrient production and logistics and avoiding the recirculation of harmful chemistry.

Waging Peace · pp. 21–22

A New Language for Carbon

Carbon Is Not the Enemy · Nature, November 2016

William McDonough has developed a New Language for Carbon that seeks to clarify the terms typically used to describe efforts to reduce carbon emissions and define new, innovative ways in which carbon can be used safely, productively and profitably. In this new paradigm, which was originally published in Nature, the life-giving carbon cycle becomes a model for human designs, enabling us to cultivate urban food systems and closed-loop flows of durable materials in which carbon is an asset rather than a liability. Carbon is not the enemy. Climate change is the result of breakdowns in the carbon cycle caused by us: it is a design failure. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make airborne carbon a material in the wrong place, at the wrong dose and wrong duration. It is we who have made carbon a toxin, like lead in our drinking water. In the right place, carbon is a resource and tool. The world's current carbon strategy aims to promote a goal of zero. Predominant language currently includes words such as “low carbon,” “zero carbon,” “negative carbon” and even a “war on carbon.” The new language signals positive intentions, leading us to do more good rather than simply less bad.

Three categories of carbon, and three behaviors

Living Carbon : Positive behavior

Organic, flowing in biological cycles, providing fresh food, healthy forests and fertile soil; something we want to cultivate and grow. Positive behavior: actions converting atmospheric carbon to forms that enhance soil nutrition or to durable forms such as polymers and solid aggregates; also recycling of carbon into nutrients from organic materials, food waste, compostable polymers and sewers.

Durable Carbon : Neutral behavior

Locked in stable solids such as coal and limestone or recyclable polymers that are used and reused; ranges from reusable fibers like paper and cloth, to building and infrastructure elements that can last for generations and then be reused. Neutral behavior: actions that transform or maintain carbon in durable Earth-bound forms and cycles across generations; or renewable energy such as solar, wind and hydropower that do not release carbon.

Fugitive Carbon : Negative behavior

Has ended up somewhere unwanted and can be toxic; includes carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, 'waste to energy' plants, methane leaks, deforestation, much industrial agriculture and urban development. Negative behavior: actions that pollute the land, water and atmosphere with various forms of carbon, for example, CO2 and methane into the atmosphere or plastics in the ocean.

Working carbon is a subset of all three categories and defined as a material being put to human use. For example, working living carbon is cultivated in agricultural systems. Working durable carbon is recycled, reused and reprocessed in circular technical systems; and working fugitive carbon includes fossil fuels used for power. Offering an inspiring model for climate action begins with changing the way we talk about carbon. Our goal is for all to embrace this new language and work toward a Carbon Positive design framework; and in doing so we may together support a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, soil, water and energy, that is economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.

Waging Peace · pp. 23–24

Circular Carbon Economy

Regenerative biosphere and circular technosphere

The Circular Carbon Economy concept serves as a framework for effective carbon management for both carbon-based materials and carbon-based sources of energy. The Circular Carbon Economy recognizes carbon's multiple forms and benefits while defining positive ways for carbon to be used safely, productively and profitably. Guided by Cradle to Cradle Design's biological and technical nutrient cycles, the Circular Carbon Economy is designed to directly address the climate crisis. With these two distinct carbon cycles, the intention is to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover carbon-based materials and hydrocarbon energy sources in ways which eliminate waste, support regenerative growth and restore the Earth's natural abundance and diversity. In this framework, biological nutrients are safely cycled to accrue living carbon into the Regenerative Biosphere while technical nutrients are safely used, reused, recycled and returned to the Circular Technosphere across generations of economic growth and prosperity.

The G20 Presidency invited William McDonough to open the March G20 Climate Stewardship Working Group and Energy Sustainability Working Group meetings by presenting the Circular Carbon Economy concept. McDonough collaborated with marine biologist Carlos Duarte on this concept, which integrates innovative business models of the larger circular economy where carbon is both a valuable material and a valuable energy source. McDonough also provided guidance and contributed to KAPSARC's CCE Guide Overview, published in August 2020, which introduces the concept and serves as an overview of the CCE Guide (www.cceguide.org). In November 2020, world leaders encouraged the use of the Circular Carbon Economy framework. “Building upon Cradle to Cradle and the New Language of Carbon, we can build a framework for carbon materials management that embraces the good intentions of the Three Rs (recycle, reduce and reuse) while seeking to improve upon their performance, adding to the traditional hierarchy new principles to eliminate the concept of waste, enable effective material flows and create a truly sustainable carbon economy that is both safe and circular. To the Three Rs, we add a fourth: Remove. Let us seek to identify, encourage and implement strategies to remove fugitive carbon from our oceans, lands and atmosphere.”

Waging Peace · pp. 25–26

The Net-Positive Carbon City

A city as a living system

William McDonough's concept for the Net-Positive Carbon City brings the new language for carbon into a tangible design framework. The Net-Positive Carbon City integrates agriculture, regenerative land management practices and urban design at a regional and international scale. It recognizes both local and distant effects of cities and envisions a holistic, synergistic system to transform fugitive carbon into durable carbon, such as plastics and building materials, as well as into living carbon, such as healthy soils, gardens, crops and landscapes. City infrastructure adapts to the new idea: for example, sewage treatment plants are reconceived as fertilizer factories and intensive integrated agriculture systems, what we call solar orchards, provide clean energy, clean food, clean water and jobs simultaneously.