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Reissued as part of Vintage's Patterns of the Planet series.
With clear, accessible – even humorous – arguments, celebrated chemist Michael Braungart and inspirational architect Bill McDonough challenge the set-in notion that human industry must damage the world. They look to nature and find a production system we can follow, a system of abundance rather than reduction, in which waste equals food.They show how we can mimic nature's model to our commercial and environmental advantage, demonstrating how products can be designed as biological and technical nutrients that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials, eradicating the need to 'recycle' – really downcycle – products into low-grade materials and uses.
Cradle to Cradle's theories have been put into practice across the world and will shape our future – they are implemented by major governments, big corporations, small, innovative independent businesses and university science departments, and are given high-profile backing by environmentalists and celebrity activists. This updated edition is essential reading, a bold, practical and overwhelmingly positive manifesto for an environmentally prosperous future, a world where we can make maximum profit from nature without destroying it.
Michael Braungart is a chemist and founder of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Hamburg. He has been lecturing at universities, businesses and institutions around the world since 1984 on critical new concepts for ecological chemistry, and is the recipient of numerous awards, honours and fellowships. William McDonough is an architect and founding principal of William McDonough + Partners based in Virginia. In 1999, Time magazine recognised him as a 'Hero for our Planet', and in 1996 he received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the highest environmental honour given by the United States.
