The Five Steps to Reinventing the World,
Step 2: Personal Preferences (with scientific experience)

(excerpt from an article in June/July 2001 Green@Work Magazine)

by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

One of the most difficult questions for anyone designing something today is "What is an ecologically sound material?" When we are asking this question, as a chemist, and as an architect and designer trying to assemble the most delightful products and places, we find ourselves having to make choices in an enormous marketplace that is largely undefined. In fact, our frustrations with making Personal Preference choices from what is currently available inspired us to found our product and process design firm.

Most of the products we see do not meet our eco-effective design criteria. Yet decisions have to be made today. A good analogy is food. Despite what we would imagine to be everyone's desire for safe, healthy, nutritious food items, and despite specific concerns such as those surrounding genetically modified organisms, people need to make food decisions every few hours. This is not something you can put off until perfection has been achieved. But your preference can be expressed and the odds are good that the effectiveness of your decision when considering these issues will be greater than it would be if you were not considering them at all.

People's reasons for making choices in the marketplace—even so-called environmental choices--might surprise you. We know from experience that many of the customers who buy our "edible" safe, healthy upholstery fabric don't necessarily do so because it's environmentally safe. In some cases, they buy it because they like the idea of using something special--an esoteric product with a real story. They like the idea of being special themselves. They may also be personally insulted by something designed with toxic substances, once they know the toxins are there. It's a matter of quality.

Whether purchasing food, furnishings, building materials, or any other product on the marketplace, you will most likely have to make a decision today that is the best of the worst. Many decisions come down to comparing two things that are both less than ideal. For example, if you want to be "chlorine-free" and avoid dioxins, you can't use recycled paper. And what if chlorine-free, even tree-free, paper pulp is grown in areas that require massive irrigation, destroying an aquifer? Then the question becomes the lesser of two evils: to put it in extreme terms, do you want to be hung, or do you want to be shot? If those are your choices, the preferences are ultimately debilitating. That is why redesign is so crucial. But there are ways to do the best with what we have. How do you make the right choices?

Preferring Ecological Intelligence

Be as sure as you can that a product or substance does not contain or support substances and practices that are most harmful to and/or disrespectful of human and environmental health. When working on a building, for example, our architects might say for a particular project that they prefer sustainably harvested wood or certified wood. Now they haven't done an extensive research project on the specific pieces of wood, but if a particular wood comes with the Forest Stewardship Council approbation it is probably better than not thinking about this issue at all. In the case of plastics, Michael might say, "I prefer something that is Free of PVC or that appears to have been done with care and consciousness, because I understand that organization or company to have these issues as a mission."

Preferring Respect

The issue of respect is absolutely vital: it is at the heart of eco-effective design. In the case of a manufactured product, the ideal product is embedded with respect on a number of different levels:

• Respect for the communities around the manufacturing plant (including the aquatic life downstream, the nearby neighborhoods);
• Respect for those who work in the manufacturing plant;
• Respect for those who handle and transport the product and its materials and substances all the way down the line;
• Respect for the customer, of course.

It is insulting to sell poorly designed products or building materials that are toxic to people who just want to have a comfortable and pleasant home; and from our perspective, the ideal product would also

• Respect future generations' need for biological and industrial wealth: it would be designed as a healthy, safe nutrient for either biological or technical cycles.

Are products poisoning indoor air, or unsafe for handling? Do they create risks for children? Can products be taken back to the manufacturer and disassembled for reuse in technical production (or, at the very least, returned to other products even at a lower quality, a term we have coined "downcycled")? With these as our ideals, we make "best of the worst" recommendations based on our experience, giving advice to the customer, particularly necessary with the chemical industry, which currently creates technical mixtures that contain many questionable byproducts.

Preferring Delight, Celebration, and Fun

Another element of Personal Preference is the clear and critical component of pleasure and delight. It's very important for ecologically intelligent products to be at the forefront of human expression. They can be an exciting part of the best of design creativity, adding pleasure and delight to life. Certainly they can accomplish more than simply making the customer feel guilty or bad in some way while immediate decisions are being made.

From the imperfect marketplace offerings, Step 2, Personal Preferences (with scientific experience) can help determine the product or substance that is "best" or "least worst," based on knowledge and judgement from 20 years of experience in this field. With such experience, we can look at products with an eye for the typical problems of textiles, appliances, glues, chemicals, and so forth. Without engaging in redesign and invention, we won't know all the details or the full lifecycle effects. But we know similar products, and we often know the companies that make them--whether they are trustworthy, whether they respect their employees and their customers, whether this is a product that we ourselves would buy, and whether this product is delightful and attractive. (From our perspective, many new "eco-efficient" products are simply not that delightful and attractive.) Instead of a program of minimizing and omitting the "bad," we prefer to celebrate an abundance of delightful products and materials that are "good." We'll describe how companies can begin such a celebration themselves with what we call eco-effective redesign in our next column.

Also read the May 2001 Monthly Feature, explaining Step 1: Free of...