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Prophet of Bloom

The future of manufacturing will be built on industrial-strength ecology, says architect William McDonough. The first step: Turn Ford’s legendary River Rouge plant into a lean, green profit machine.

By Florence Williams

A sign up ahead reads WARNING: SLAG HAULER CROSSING. Sitting in the back of a sedan, architect William McDonough is riding through Ford’s aging River Rouge factory complex in Dearborn, Michigan.
At 1,100 acres, it’s the largest industrial site of early- to mid-20th century America, a testament to the scale of Henry Ford’s vision. The Armani-clad McDonough surveys the ruins strung along the dark, slack river,
cruising past eye-level piles of black, powdery ash heaps, a spindly gas tower, and the proto-industrial blast ovens. A red oxygen furnace belches as it haltingly refines coke into steel.

It hardly looks like the site of the next industrial revolution, yet that is exactly what McDonough intends to make it. In late 2000, the Ford Motor Company hired McDonough, a designer cum environmentalist, to
blueprint the site’s 20-year, $2 billion redesign. The centerpiece will be a vast but energy-efficient truck assembly plant, not far from a new low-emission paint plant. Company CEO William Clay Ford Jr.,
Henry’s great-grandson, says that the goal is nothing less than transforming River Rouge into "the model of 21st-century sustainable manufacturing."

Green architecture is an emerging field, and McDonough, who was trained at Dartmouth and Yale, spent most of the ’80s experimenting with it. His highly lauded Herman Miller factory in Zeeland, Michigan,
and Gap corporate offices in San Bruno, California, are designed to maximize natural lighting and air circulation. At Oberlin College, in Ohio, he built a solar- and geothermal-powered facility for the
environmental studies department designed to generate more energy than it uses.

In 1995, the architect teamed up with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, to found a research and consulting firm called McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. The company specializes in
environmentally safe manufacturing processes and materials. The MBDC message is that "regulations are signals of design failure" and that everything from cars to computers to urban centers can be designed
so that they never pollute.

"Regulations are signals of design failure," declares McDonough: Everything from cars to urban centers can be designed to never pollute.

With the fuel-injected charisma of a motivational speaker, McDonough frequently tells seminar attendees, industry groups, and clients like Intel, Nike, IBM, Monsanto, and Wal-Mart that we can all be rich,
happy, and free from liberal guilt. He sees no inherent contradiction between greening the world and profit-making, and once riled the hemp-shirt crowd for stating that he would like to be a billionaire primarily
"as an inspiration to other people."

For McDonough, who is 50 and a part-time professor at the University of Virginia, River Rouge is a mighty feather. The scale of the Ford project – and the potential reach of the global company – represents
all-new opportunities, both in terms of fame and influence. Rouge will, he hopes, be his Bilbao, or better. "Frank Gehry can apply his principles at the level of a museum, but can he apply them to the level of
an urban context? No. Can he apply them to furniture? Yes. Can he apply them to the material in the furniture? No," McDonough declares, tousling his brick-colored locks. "I’m developing an operating system
for sustainability."

McDonough’s grandiose plan extends far beyond architecture. He wants to remake the Ford Motor Company and then make over everything else. He’s prone to statements like "I want to solarize California" and
"What if a car were a buffalo? Now wouldn’t that be interesting?" He says he wants to change the way Americans think about mobility, energy, communications, synthetic materials, and even nature itself.

In some ways, Ford’s Rouge facility couldn’t be a better test bed for McDonough’s happy new world. It was once the most studied and admired manufacturing complex anywhere. In the 1930s, the Rouge
employed 100,000 workers and encompassed 15 million square feet of factories scattered across a site the size of New York’s Central Park. Outside, an entire fleet of ore freighters idled along the dredged
Rouge River, and inside, 100 miles of railroad tracks knotted the grounds. Industrialists from all over the world came to witness the only physical plant where wood, sand, ore, and rubber went in one end and
finished vehicles – everything from tractors to Mustangs – spilled out the other. The facility made Ford’s every engine, windshield, and tire, but over time the company shifted its manufacturing operations,
spreading them across more than 100 sites worldwide. By the 1980s, much of the complex was obsolete and fearfully contaminated with carcinogens. Even so, it limped along, never shutting down entirely.
Then a boiler exploded in 1999, killing six workers and injuring two dozen more. The Rouge needed serious help.

McDonough saw an opening. Using a few well-placed contacts, he wrangled a meeting with the company’s recently appointed 43-year-old chair, Bill Ford. "I went up to his office and he said, ‘Why are you
here?’" recalls the architect. "I said, ‘What interests me is that you can change the world. With $80 billion of purchase orders, all you have to do is say you want a different way, and things start to move.’"

The meeting, scheduled for half an hour, lasted all afternoon. The two men talked about McDonough’s radical – some would say kooky – ideas for the future of industrial manufacturing. The tenets of this new
world are laid out in McDonough’s provocative new book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, due out in April. In it, he envisions a technically advanced world of zero waste, where nothing
ever hits the trash bin and all materials, under a kind of karmic destiny, can be recovered to lead productive lives over and over again.

McDonough argues that traditional recycling is tired and inadequate. We need, he writes, to move beyond merely sorting our trash. That might help us reuse some tin and plastic but just postpones their
inevitable trip to the landfill. He dismisses the familiar plastic bottles-to-fleece shtick altogether: The bottles are made with antimony, a heavy metal. Why use hazardous materials at all? Why not design a
productive afterlife into materials at the outset? So MBDC created a wool-and-cellulose upholstery textile that can, when composted, serve as garden mulch. It’s an example of what McDonough terms a
"biological nutrient," able to biodegrade completely.

Of course, not everything can be made out of plant matter. But even synthetics, says McDonough, can be fabricated to be continually reprocessed in industry. McDonough terms these "technical nutrients."
Worn-out plastic consumer goods can’t be composted, but they can remain useful, even valuable, to manufacturing.

Nylon, for example, typically cannot be broken down without leaving residual waste. But a new process pioneered by the German chemical company BASF – not incidentally an MBDC client – can now yield a
perfectly reconfigurable nylon fiber. The new fiber is easily depolymerized into simple molecules and then easily repolymerized to start all over. After it’s woven into products like carpets, it can be returned to
the manufacturer to be remade. Caught in a virtuous circle, such goods need never be discarded. Instead of being inefficiently "down-cycled" into something like a plastic park bench, your carpet can be
reincarnated every time you redecorate.

Herein lies the Big McDonough Idea: "The materials go back to soils safely, or they go back to industry. That’s it. That’s the new paradigm."

But how new is it? Certainly garbage theorists like Barry Commoner posited similar closed-loop ideas. In their 1999 book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, authors Paul Hawken,
Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins sketch out plans for responsible, efficient manufacturing that incorporates materials recycling. McDonough proselytizes incessantly, but his contribution is that he is starting to
develop the necessary technologies that might make it all work. With the right materials, even something as complicated as a car could simply be melted down and turned into a new car, says McDonough. And
since automobiles are increasingly being leased by drivers anyway, why not build consumers’ loyalty by continuously and profitably transforming their old cars into snazzy new ones? In McDonough-speak,
"Even manufacturing can become a restorative act."

The "living" roof of grass insulates the factory, filters emissions, returns rainwater to the river at EPA-approved levels – and will save Ford millions.

Bill Ford, who sits on the board of Conservation International and has long maintained an interest in things green, liked what he heard that day. He later said of McDonough, "He’s got a hell of a sales pitch.
He’s very persuasive, and we were on the same wavelength immediately." McDonough says his presentation "totally fit into Ford’s personality, his psyche, and his whole understanding of the way the world
works." At the end of their meeting, Ford looked out over the Rouge and then turned to ask McDonough, "Do you think you can apply what you and I have been talking about to that place?"

Even for someone with McDonough’s messianic ambition, remaking the Rouge will be no easy task. First there’s the contamination, which the company is required by an EPA consent order to clean up. Then
there’s the reality that the automaker had a terrible 2001. Total sales were down 9 percent over the previous year, and Ford is still forking over expensive settlements in the Explorer-Firestone tire debacle.
Recession and war make the green whims of Bill Ford seem less than urgent. On top of all that, there’s a corporate engineering culture that tends to look quizzically, if at all, at environmental do-gooding.

McDonough seems undaunted. When he talks about his work on the project, he is both confident and grave. "If we can’t apply our ideas here, then we’re just blowing smoke," he says. He grows animated as his
sedan approaches a sprawling, 1 million-square-foot steel-framed building that will be the new state-of-the-art truck assembly plant. Although McDonough is not the architect of record (the company is using a
local industrial firm), he has had a significant hand in it. There are plenty of McDonoughesque details: The building will encourage recycling by having no trash room, as the company is requiring all its
suppliers to use returnable packaging. But the plant’s most ecologically correct feature is also its biggest architectural statement – a "living" roof of grass seemingly vast enough for a herd of antelope. The
half-million-square-foot covering is designed to absorb rainwater, filter stack emissions, and insulate the factory. It consists of a series of box-shaped panels filled with 5 inches of topsoil and planted with sedges.
The green roof has become something of a McDonough trademark; there’s one topping the Gap’s offices in San Bruno.

Around a bend, McDonough nears a grassy lot with a few new plantings, as incongruous as a community garden in the South Bronx. McDonough and Ford are working with a Michigan State University biologist
who is pioneering phytoremediation, a process that uses plants to break down and purify hazardous chemicals – in this case, the mutagenic pyrene, anthracine, and other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that
spill over from the coke ovens. "Typically, they do what they call hog-and-haul, or scrape-and-bake," explains McDonough. "They come in and they take away the bad stuff, and then it’s somebody else’s
problem. We want to do remediation onsite." The most promising plants so far, big bluestem and green ash, are area natives that will also attract wildlife, moderate surface air temperatures, and provide scenic
breaks.

Up the road at the Rouge office building, a lattice of dark nylon-mesh covers the brick exterior, forming an unusual trellis. McDonough hopes the vine-covered surface will attract nesting birds. "The idea is that
all of the surfaces become alive. So instead of dead brick, we’ll have ‘living’ walls. Why not make oxygen? Why not provide a habitat for hummingbirds? Why not?"

Well, for starters, it all seems a little whimsical. Does building a truck plant with a grass roof help the environment? Does it even make the roof better? Will companies really invest millions of dollars up front to
overhaul traditional manufacturing systems in order to realize long-term, even intangible benefits?

Tim O’Brien, former director of Ford’s Environmental Quality Office and one of the Ford execs to whom McDonough reported, answers those questions with a qualified yes. No matter what, Ford must retrofit the
Rouge, O’Brien says. It might as well do it right and take the opportunity to experiment with some potentially influential technologies. Standing amid displays and coffee cups in the Rouge Room, a basement
bunker that serves as redesign headquarters, he lays out the numbers: The architect’s plan for the $18 million rainwater treatment system – of which the grass roof is a major part – will potentially spare Ford from
having to build a $50 million mechanical treatment facility to meet EPA standards. Designed to clean some 20 billion gallons of rainwater annually, the system should be fully operational by Ford’s centennial
in 2003. The roof already returns water to the Rouge River at EPA-approved levels of cleanliness for the first time since anyone bothered to monitor it. As O’Brien puts it, "We haven’t always looked broadly at
some of the social and ecological costs and benefits of the business decisions that we make, but when you take that wider-angle lens, you sometimes find good examples of ecological projects that are terrific
business successes as well."

Other McDonough initiatives have been nixed. The company was loath to plant native prairie grasses on the roof (they have a tendency to catch on fire). Instead, McDonough is using a Mediterranean variety.
Furthermore, "wind power is a special suggestion of Bill’s we haven’t been able to make sense of now," says O’Brien. Ford, is, after all, an old economy kind of place. "Somebody as visionary as Bill, you know,
it’s hard to get used to," says Don Russell, an engineer in the company’s environmental quality office. "And a lot of people here are the type you wouldn’t expect to be amenable to suggestions, so I’ve seen a
lot of strange things I wasn’t really expecting. Things like the grass roof didn’t seem like they’d fit with the way we normally do business, but I think he’s really changed a lot of minds since he’s been here."

McDonough still has a few minds to win over. So far, Detroit insiders have reserved judgment on the worth of the green elements. Paul Eisenstein, who is a veteran industry watcher and the publisher of
TheCarConnection.com, ticks off his list of questions: "Will these innovations truly work as planned? Will Ford’s commitment hold? Will it follow through at other plants, or will this only be a showcase?" Jim Hall,
an analyst with industry research firm Auto Pacific, answers him: "The truth is, if it’s replicable to other industrial sites, it works. If it isn’t, it doesn’t – but even so, a greener face for the company alone has value, if
for no other reason than for PR."

Not surprisingly, PR value doesn’t satisfy many environmentalists, who, after all, believe that the single most damaging invention for the planet was the internal combustion engine. "I have visited Ford’s bed of
native prairie blooms, and I cannot help but ask: What, in fact, is all this sustaining?" says architecture and planning critic Jane Holtz Kay. She wryly notes that, no matter how green its landscape, the
automaker still "flogs its hottest seller, the SUV." David Korten, president of the People-Centered Development Forum, explains: "It’s like when advertisements say, ‘You can contribute to the environment by
buying an energy-efficient air conditioner,’ when the proper response would be to just open the window."

"If you have a solar-powered SUV and all the materials go back in the automotive system and the tires degrade safely – then drive all you want."

"Yes, Ford makes SUVs," groans McDonough. "Can we justify working with them? Yes." He elaborates: "If you have a solar-powered SUV, which is what we’re going to do, and all the materials are designed to
go back in the automotive system and the tires all degrade into safe molecules for worms, then I don’t care, drive around all you want. It’s not a problem." Clearly though, the criticism puts him on the defensive.
"Whom am I supposed to work with?" he asks. "These are the agents of change. And they are committed to a major transformation."

Perhaps, but so far, the McDonough "revolution" has proceeded step by baby step – a pace not always so different from business as usual. For example, when McDonough helped Nike design a new rubber, the
company patented the process. Made from water-based solubles instead of volatile organic compounds, the rubber is greener than the old type and even costs slightly less – but only Nike gets to use it. General
manager Darcy Winslow defends the decision to keep the rubber recipe a secret and points to a counterexample: cushioning foam. The shoemaker asked DuPont to reformulate the foam that’s the soul of its
sneakers, and while the new, greener foam is patented, "DuPont supplies it to hundreds of other manufacturers," says Winslow.

McDonough has no time for niggling details, a trait that suggests another big thinker zealous to unite a big mission with big profits: Henry Ford himself. Nostalgic for his agrarian roots, Ford experimented with
his own brand of recycling. He wore a fragile suit made with a fiber derived from soybean husks (his tailor told him not to cross his legs, lest the trousers crack). Back in 1941, he even attempted to turn soybean
pulp into car-seat textiles and to laminate the fibrous plant base into plastic car bodies. "I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forest, nor use up the mines, but shall draw its material from
the annual produce of the field," he wrote. "The part that has food value will be separated and made into a perfect food for man, and the rest of the plant will find its use in industry."

McDonough, in his own sort of karmic recycling, may fulfill the old man’s dreams. Then again, Ford’s offbeat soybean idea proved short lived. There was no way to make the soy-covered cars waterproof. The
prototypes melted in the rain.

Florence Williams ([email protected]) lives in Montana and has written for Outside, The New Republic, and The New York Times.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/mcdonough_pr.html

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