Michael Braungart

Michael Braungart

Michael Braungart was born in 1958 and is currently 67 years old. Michael Braungart was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, West Germany. Braungart attended the University of Hannover where he received a PhD in chemistry.

Michael Braungart is a chemist that advocates that humans are able to make a positive rather than negative environmental impact by redesigning industrial production and therefore that dissipation isn’t waste. He is a former Greenpeace activist that used to live in a tree as protest, and is thought to be a visionary environmental thinker.

After finishing his studies in the field of Process Engineering, he investigated the chemical processes of industrial production techniques with the Chemistry Department in Germany. It subsequently led to him forming the Chemistry Section of Greenpeace International. He’d assumed leadership of Greenpeace Chemistry, by the time he completed his PhD in chemistry at the University of Hannover in 1985.

In 1987, he founded the EPEA in Hamburg, and at the core of EPEA is Cradle to Cradle Design, which creates products oriented toward a life-cycle economy.

He also serves as Scientific Manager of the Hamburg Environmental Institute, which is a non-profit research center which produces the “Top 50 Study”. It ranks the quality of environmentally sound production of companies within the chemical industry. Michael has initiated scholarly and scientific inquiry into the adverse physiological and environmental impacts of industrially produced consumer goods.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things is a manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of environmentalism and manufacture.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is what all the environmentalists urge. Do more with less so that you can minimize damage. However what this visionary and provocative book argues, it’s an approach that perpetuates a one-way “cradle to the grave” manufacturing model which dates back to the Industrial Revolution and casts off around 90% of the materials as waste, much of it being toxic. Why not challenge such a notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world?

In fact, why not even take nature itself as our model? A tree will produce thousands of blossoms while creating another tree, but we don’t consider its abundance wasteful yet safe, highly effective, and beautiful, thus “waste equals food” is the first principle this book sets forth. Products may be designed so that, after they’ve had a useful life, they might provide nourishment for something new, either as “biological nutrients” which safely re-enter the environment or as “technical nutrients” which circulate within closed loop industrial cycles, without ever being “downcycled” into low grade uses, like most “recyclables” are now.

Elaborating on their principles from experience (re)designing everything from corporate campuses to carpeting, Michael and William make a viable and exciting case for change.

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Michael Braungart: F.A.Q