Designer Forum - August/September 2008

By Brian Hamilton

Even though sustainable design has been around for a number of years and is becoming more important by the day, the practice is still very much in its infancy because most businesses, especially manufacturers, don’t truly understand what it should entail, says one of the true experts in sustainable design, Bill McDonough. He’s the founding principal of Charlottesville, Virginia based McDonough + Partners and the promoter of the concept of Cradle To Cradle, outlined in his 2002 book by the same name.

The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program to certify green buildings is a step in the right direction, but its guidelines still have too many holes, McDonough says.

In the case of flooring, McDonough says, it’s just about an impossible task for most designers to determine what flooring is truly green and what’s not, partly because they have to get beyond all the hype. And after that, there isn’t much to go on.

“When a designer starts to think about these things, they think it’s their responsibility to select all the great things that are out there that represent ecological intelligence,” McDonough says.

“Their early discovery is there’s no data or there’s no products or there’s competing claims, or there’s greenwashing. There’s a lot of confusing claims in the marketplace. Designers discover they’re not meant to be able to select the very best ones because it’s a very complex universe. They go through a whole anxiety period of how to relate to the question. My anxiety basically only gets resolved when I see scientific data that tells me that what I’m doing is intelligent.”

The cradle to cradle concept, among other things, advocates an entirely different approach to manufacturing products that takes into account what will happen at the end of their useful life. In other words, every product should be designed to be biodegradable and return to nature as food, or be completely reused in another product, preferably the same product, to create a closed loop. It sounds like a fairly simple idea but in practice it’s extraordinarily complex because every component of a product has to be examined in depth in terms of human health and environmental relevance. In addition, the infrastructure has to be put in place to recycle the product at the end of its life. This creates what he calls an “eco-effective” product.

“To get to total sustainability is going to take forever, but that’s the point,” McDonough says.

It’s not enough, McDonough says, for products to have recycled content, be made of natural materials or give off no gases, the things commonly touted in the green marketing of floorcovering as “eco-efficient.” The products should be free of toxic materials and made with renewable energy—preferably solar, wind, or geothermal energy—and they should produce only clean water in their manufacturing.

“How can it be a high quality product if it is destroying the environment or making people sick?” he asks. “What good is it if you’re recycling a toxic material and you get a LEED point for it?”

In McDonough’s view, products that are eco-efficient are merely “less bad” and are still going in the wrong direction.

McDonough’s been working on this problem since 1995 through his McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) group with German chemist Michael Braungart, and its primary goal is to provide cradle to cradle third party certifications for products of all kinds that meet their requirements. So far about 150 products have earned varying levels of certification (gold, silver, platinum and basic). Shaw’s EcoWorx broadloom, EcoWorx tile and EcoSolution Q fiber have all received silver certification. Solutia’s Ultron fiber has also received silver certification, as has Zeftron’s premium nylon. They’re the only floorcovering materials that have completed the certification process.

Most other current third party certification programs only touch on certain aspects of the issue, and taken as a group there are still a lot of missing pieces. For example, GreenGuard and FloorScore certifications only cover the volatile organic compounds in products. The Carpet and Rug Institute’s Green Label Plus program certifies air quality and recycled content. None of them deals with the end-of-life issue the way the MBDC certification does.

“We support LEED and all these programs like FloorScore and they’re all valuable in their own way but I just don’t know that they’re sufficient,” McDonough says. “There’s a lot of questions they can’t get into because of limited budgets and limited time.”

For example, even a wool carpet, which is considered one of the greenest carpets around because it comes from a natural renewable resource, isn’t necessarily a clearcut story.

“When we did a fabric in wool, we looked at 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry that it could be finished with and there were only 38 we could use that wouldn’t pollute the water,” McDonough says.

A substantial portion of green design is being done for LEED certification. And while the program is laudable, McDonough says, the requirements tend to confuse the picture. It’s not a good guideline for green materials, he says.

For example, Shaw’s cradle to cradle certified carpet is designed to be completely recycled into the same carpet but it contains no recycled content, so it misses out on a LEED point for recycled content. However, products with cradle to cradle certification can contribute to a LEED Innovation point.

There are a few things any designer can do, McDonough says, such as finding out where wood flooring comes from, and finding out what finishes or adhesives are used on any product. Perhaps the biggest contribution, he says, is to provide leadership, encouraging companies to take the cradle to cradle approach.

“It’s really not fair to ask designers to be chemists,” McDonough says. “That’s why it’s going to be important to have certifications like ours.”

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