The Next Industrial Revolution

Featuring the work of William McDonough - William McDonough is the Dean of architecture at University of Virginia at Charlottesburg, and one of the leading spokesmen of the movement to rebuild the world using ecological design at a profit. Some quotes - "Waste equals food: eliminate the concept of waste" "What if all the byproducts of human activity were wetlands, wildlands and beauty?" This is one of the most powerful films in the festival. This film is so good that we will be showing it continuously near the film rental office in the student union - you can pretend that William McDonough is speaking at our eco-fair.

This film explores the work of Time Magazine "Hero for the Planet" William McDonough. While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete forever-scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more exciting and hopeful future. In his vision humanity takes nature itself as our guide reinventing technical enterprises to be as safe and ever renewing as natural processes.

Can't happen? It's already happening...at Nike, at Ford Motor Company, at Oberlin College, at Herman Miller Furniture, and at DesignTex...and it's part of what architect McDonough and his partner, chemist Michael Braungart, call "The Next Industrial Revolution". Shot in Europe and the United States, the film explores how businesses are transforming themselves to work with nature and enhance profitability.

McDonough persuasively argues for a radical rethinking of design, from the current "Cradle-to-grave" approach where everything we use eventually ends up in a landfill (some things may be down cycled once or twice on the way to the landfill) to a "Cradle-to-Cradle" approach where everything is either a product of consumption and is designed to become nutrients in earth's biological cycles or is a product of use and is designed to be continuously recycled into new products. He also argues for design that allows modern industrial society to run on solar energy. He shows the fallacy of the environment versus economics debate, and introduces the distinction between solutions that are only "less bad" and solutions that have a positive good effect. He feels that good design can make complex environmental regulations obsolete - systems that require complex environmental regulations are a symbol of design failure.

See McDonough working to solve multibillion-dollar problems with some of the largest firms on Earth (Ford Motor Company, Nike, Interface Carpets, Steelcase Manufacturing).