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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

By William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Published by North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In 2001, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, sustainability pioneers and founders of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, approached us with the opportunity to produce a book based on their visionary philosophy that “waste equals food.” Seeing the project’s potential for impacting society’s very notion of design and the environment, we signed on to the project to produce Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

This Book Is Not a Tree

Before collaborating with McDonough and Braungart, we had patented DuraBooks™, a new waterproof book format, which turned out to be the perfect vessel for a revolutionary new message. DuraBooks use special threads and nontoxic, nonsoluble glues to bind synthetic paper in a fashion that is both waterproof and more durable than traditional hardcovers.

As a physical embodiment of the paradigm-shifting ideas presented in William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s text, the packaging for Cradle to Cradle transformed a book into what the authors memorably termed a “technical nutrient”: a nontoxic, manufactured product whose component parts can be safely broken down and reused in perpetuity.

A Measurable Impact

Cradle to Cradle has had a tremendous impact on the world of sustainable thinking. The idea that waste equals food has influenced leaders globally, and McDonough and Braungart’s ideas are taught in design, business, and architecture schools around the globe.