97 Quotes by William McDonough

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

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

The eco-effective future of industry is a world of abundance that celebrates the use and consumption of products and materials that are, in effect, nutritious – as safe, effective, and delightful as a cherry tree.

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness – and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there’s no problem.

Richard Meier told me, ‘Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture,’

I can’t imagine something being beautiful at this point in history if it’s destroying the planet or causing children to get sick. How can anything be beautiful if it’s not ecologically intelligent at this point?

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

We achieved our mission to the moon. Let’s look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth – that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.