 Hi everybody. I'd like to take a look at these words resource abundance and design. That's what we're here to talk about and I've had the opportunity to work with German chemist Dr. Michael Brown guard and we've Written cradle to cradle and then the upcycle and what we're looking at is a world of good and How to do that by design because I see design as the first signal of human intention And if we intend to be less bad Perhaps we'll still be bad just less so by definition So what would it mean to be more good? Let's start with a poem from the 12th century Glance at the Sun see the moon and the stars Gaze at the beauty of the earth's greening now Think glance see gaze Think She goes on to say what a delight God gives to humankind with all these things a delight beauty wonderment and Then all nature is at the disposal of humankind. This has been part of our thinking We are to work with it for without it. We cannot survive this turns into sustainability and use of the natural world But you know when you think about sustainability if I asked you what your relationship was with your loved ones And you said sustainable I Say I'm sorry It doesn't sound that interesting now I was born in Japan and a traditional Japanese house and as a baby at three years old I would lie on a futon and I would listen to the ox carts as the farmers collected our sewage and they would take it to the farms this is The Netherlands and the cities and the farms were always one organism and I always thought isn't this great poop stories The farms in the cities are one thing and this is a city that I heard about as a five-year-old which is Hiroshima and Then I heard about this City that took thousands of years to build took seconds to destroy It takes thousands of years to build it takes seconds to destroy and I thought to myself some day I'm gonna understand why people might do this to each other and how is it even possible to do this? So when I was 19 and I was in college I decided I wanted to study international relations Which I did but then I wanted to understand how this could even happen And so the professor in physics said you must understand the special theory of relativity because the answer is there And then I realized that if C is a huge number approaching affinity and square it It's gigantic and if M is the one like in one hydrogen atom then the E is gigantic and that is the atom bomb and A tool's value is put there by the purpose to which the human puts it Design is the signal of intention and then I stared at a fire burning and I thought about entropy And I said oh, it's all we have is this chaos of carbon and minerals and water that never can re-aggregate Is that what we're learning and I said there must be negative entropy because I'm from Asia We must have the opposite. What would it be and I couldn't find it in the physics library? I found extra g enthalpy. I find lots of things but not negative entropy until I realized that what's happening here Is the carbon is going into the atmosphere the oxygen is coming down and the reason I couldn't find negative entropy in physics Is because from a design perspective its biology? That's why these are the aggregators of dissimilar things that have been dispersed. There's the co2 Nature has found a way to take co2 out of the atmosphere and put it in soil And you realize that the only income on the planet is actually solar energy Carbon and some nitrogen and that we release oxygen isn't that amazing and so you start to think that E and M E is physics M is chemistry and what about biology, so I studied Francis Crick After discovering DNA nine years later. He wrote an essay for the University of Washington called the nature of vitalism He determined in order to be a living thing You had to have three conditions growth income and an open system of chemicals operating for the benefit of the organism and its reproduction This is fascinating. This means the M the mass is precious and that it's all we have except for bits of income here So let's treat the mass preciously and that's when I realized I if I ever became an architect for example I was an art student I will design buildings like trees So I designed a daycare center in Germany where the children would operate it would grow its own food make its own Energy provide community laundry, but I was sitting with the daycare center teachers Programming it and I saw that the children were eating the building so I thought well wait a minute. What are they eating? So I decided to find a chemist which I did Michael Brown grad and we started to look at what about these chemicals And what's going on with this open system of chemicals? And we realized that if we could design materials like Crick is talking about the biosphere of waste equals food an open system of chemicals operating for the benefit organisms and their reproduction the humans in the last 5,000 years have developed another Metabolism which is the technical one since we started banging metal and that these both Metabolism can operate for the benefit of our species and the reproduction of all species and biodiversity So we design into these two Metabolism now humility is required because for 5,000 years We'd never figured out how to put two wheels on our luggage So we're not as smart as we sometimes think but then when we started to think what if we design Materials that can go back to nature safely the things we wear the things we use in water and then things as technical Nutrition that go back to industry forever the polymers the aluminum since 1850 75% of the aluminum made by humans is still in circulation Technical nutrition think about this even solar collectors even if we use cadmium could be seen as being Nutrition for technology the future as long as they're safe My first product was a textile where we brought the chemists in and we looked at the rivers with textile mills This one in Indonesia and we said wait a minute the river is black and it's toxic really So we redesigned it we looked at 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry We're just it down to 38 for wool and ramey and made a fabric so safe the water coming out of the mill Which goes to Lake Constance in the Alps is clean as Swiss drinking water Why not because we can do this by design isn't that astonishing the trimming which used to be hazardous waste Became mulch for the local garden club the company no longer had to send it to Spain for burial or burning Imagine so we took a look at technical nutrition. This is carpet carpet in the United States We have 1.4 billion pounds of carpet waste in the United States every year some of it PVC very hazardous Material to handle and so we started designing this for Berkshire Hathaway Is now the largest carp company in the world the tech technical nutrient skins face shorns back to caprolactum The back is the thermoplastic polyolefin so the carpet becomes carpet again forever You're storing your materials on your customers floors, and they can be used ad infinitum To make carpet over and over again. That's it. We take these materials We put them in materials bank you have a relationship with the customer, which is perpetual now Right before the earth summit a book came out that struck me because I was writing the Hanover Principles and Designed for sustainability, and it was a book called ecocide in the USSR it pointed out that 16% percent of the former USSR was uninhabitable Toxification and that this is what we're looking at in terms of its arable land 50% Imperiled and what does that take us to today for example here in China a couple months ago? This was announced China has about 12% of its land is arable of that 12% just now This is government statistic 19.4% has been declared contaminated to toxic to grow food 20% imagine that and what is it? It's cadmium. It's lead. It's the materials that we use to make things like this Well our cadmium and lead bad. No, they're materials if we use them as solder They're busy over there see and if we sequester them in technical nutrition We can use them out of tonight, but when they get in the biosphere They are neurotoxins mutagens carcinogen and so on. This is who non-province this rice should not be eaten What is a toxin a toxin is a material in the wrong place lead in a computer is solder Letting Charles brain is brain death. Okay, so when did we decide that carbon was a toxin? Imagine we are carbon if you don't like carbon shoot yourself dry up and blow away because you are carbon All right So when did we take carbon from the atmosphere that's been made into an asset over millennia and turn it into a liability? Well, we did it by sending all the ancient carbon back into the atmosphere whoops backwards upside down and then all of a sudden we got the greenhouse effect and now carbon has become a toxin We did that Did we do that on purpose? I don't know was that our design if it's not our design Who's got the plan so the question becomes can I bring carbon and nitrogen to the soil? Can't we release oxygen by design? So I was asked by NASA to think about designing the the space station For Mars, and I said before we go to Mars. What if we come back to the blue planet first? So we got this team that developed the design of the space station and we got together in Houston and started in The room where they heard the words Houston. We have a problem So we started there and this team these are people who nuclear powers a station with with nuclear energy coming from a reactor 93 million miles away a safe distance eight minutes and wireless isn't that interesting so we took that team and designed a building and here It is it's in Mountain View, California This building can make a hundred twenty percent of the energy it needs from renewable power and purify its own water down to The last molecule and it we did it with a normal federal budget for now puts building ahead of schedule So let's not just talk about more efficient buildings. Let's talk about buildings like trees We want more of them and the problem is so many people today report their environmental behaviors, etc As let's be less bad reduce our carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020 if you're telling us you want nothing Well, then why don't we go and put it below the line because wanting nothing It's like saying if I run out of here and jump in a taxi and say quick. I'm not going to the airport Is this helpful? We're not telling people where we're going. So let's start saying we get rid of the bad stuff Let's start doing the good stuff. What does the good stuff look like so it's not just reduce your badness And so we do an inventory if it's materials we do every molecule We don't want to recruit your mother's milk if it's energy. We want to clean and renewable if it's water We want it safe and healthy. So let's take a look at all these conditions that we have today over here in these various things And let's not just shrink their badness and report that we've reduced our emissions. Let's start to increase The goodness. Let's start focusing here, too. We do both Out with that stuff in with this stuff. It's about constant improvement so the idea of our Upcycling is that things get better every day not just less bad and It doesn't mean don't do this reductivism it means also Send a positive message to the children that we have an idea of what the future might look like by design with good intention And so just as we look at that and close it I'd like to think about what it means to have Carbon for example once again become an asset For humans instead of a liability and we'll start with that because so many people are concerned on the carbon front. So mark Show us how you do that. Thank you This product is now going through a cradle to cradle certification review Which is very exciting because it's the design for the circular economy. We look at materials that are nutrients We look at materials that have reverse logistics new business models new ways of getting these materials back into cycles We look at essentially waste equals food and that everything is food for something else technology or biology And we take the old paradigm of take make waste and we reverse it in this point in history See God never sent a bill for the trees So what can we do in the future where we can get materials cheaper than free think about it? So when we stop and look at just I call this either or and the or is with an E You can either get mining of the earth if you're looking for gold and you make about $210 per ton on the gold or we could mine circuit boards from old telephones Let me get about seventy five hundred dollars per ton. So what if we mine the cities? What if we mine the things we make now and we start designing the things we make now for what's next? So we design what's next into what's now and we understand how they relate to ecosystems and organisms This is a sewer treatment plant sewage treatment plant. That is sewage fledge a Mechanic working with that discovered the pipes are all clogging up with minerals So he sent them through in a vortex and guess what happened that happened This is known as struvite that is phosphate if there's a slow-release fertilizers that can be sold at a 12% profit So all of a sudden we realize that sewage treatment is silly We take these valuable nutrients in the biosphere add chlorine and throw them in the water All right, what if we turn that into fertilizer for farmers nitrogen? Phosphates we all need three to four grams of phosphate per day. Where are we going? Kazakhstan, Morocco for this when they're right there in our cities So when you start to think about it imagine Paris with the roofs covered with farming, you know Just for conceptual purposes imagine Washington DC being highly productive. Isn't that interesting? So we start to think about what would a city this is a one-day sketch saying well Wait a minute. What would buildings be if you could if a city grew its own food How could we start to think about those things and I did the project for the Ford Motor Company to Revitalize this thousand hectare site known as the River Rouge in Detroit And we ended up doing the world's largest green roof and when you stop and think about this building is making oxygen purifying water And it's saved for thirty five million dollars in CapEx day one over conventional chemical systems Which means it's the equivalent of walking into the board to get permission for this and saying I could I have the equivalent of an Order for nine hundred million dollars worth of cars that at four percent margin Brad Pitt and I looked at New Orleans and decided to see if we could help after the hurricane Katrina Ten thousand people were displaced here So we went and looked and met with the community started a foundation called make it right and started working with the local Residents to see what it meant for them to come home And we decided to build a neighborhood of 150 houses were at about 103 now And we hired architects from around the world local to international and we gave the people choices of Many designs and they could choose their own But what I love the most is the children came back from the FEMA trailers with asthma Because they've been surrounded by formaldehyde and these kids want to sing and dance This is New Orleans the home of the first original American music And if these children can't sing and dance there's something wrong in the world And so these people have a four hundred dollar mortgage They get their power from the Sun they can afford to give the kids dance and singing lessons And the great thing is the children came back they couldn't breathe Now you can breathe This is a project in the Netherlands that is designed to make its own food power itself And these are office buildings selling in a market where office buildings can be bought for one year's rent And it's because people want to be in places like this and the buildings they're seen as material banks They're storing materials for future generations after designed for this assembly It's worth about 1.4 percent in the financing pro forma. It's this project here as a result of this We've just been given this near Skippal if you can imagine the scale we're dealing with here And what we're looking at is this massive project where logistics are here Biology is here and in a way the conceptual framework is technical nutrition biological nutrition This will be a cradle-to-cradle hub for the circular economy companies and people can come here We also I wanted to look at Pakistan and Haiti when these disasters occurred because we wanted to help and And it occurred to me after hearing from Muhammad Yunus from Grameen Bank and some friends They said Bill you've got to take on the housing issue for the super poor And so I started to think well if we're gonna have the first industrial revolution using natural resources What are we using in the next one where we can afford the materials and so I realized this is material These are sachets and packaging we say over giving the poor these little packages isn't that wonderful and yet This is it wait a minute. Is that all we got so I thought well, let me do some conceptual work What if these relief situations actually produce capital formation of things that people could use again and start to create communities? They're actually viable in the short term But also could be disassembled and used as resources over the long term and could adapt to local cultures Depending on what you want to do with the building systems. So we started to look at if you think about a resource like plastics from New York Where the films are the bulk of it and they're paying $80 a ton to get rid of it So I decided my design team would be sixth graders So we brought together the children to start to think about designing towns and I've got to tell you I'd rather live in this than most of these little barracks like refugee camps Frankly, and so we started to think conceptually What if we could take these materials and people could build a house in one day with their children without tools And we started to think about what the systems could be like that will allow that kind of thing to occur This house is since it has a dignified core 10 feet tall You could add wings to this or surrounded it could becomes eight bedrooms if you want And so we have the children laying out streets and groups for housing This is just the the the sort of bulk version of it. It's very refined now But even things like that window are just flipping out on a spring so they don't require complex mechanisms and we started looking at using these polymers to make various kinds of Plastics parts the kids can put together to build houses We have eight joints coming together in a flat space. They just put a rivet and away we go We have unfolding roofs for smaller buildings and mushroom insulation Believe it or not as we experiment in different ways to do things in biosphere and technosphere The styles of the houses will be up to the people. This is building systems So in the United States we use two by fours in plywood You know, what if we had different sized parts and the commercial model is based on an inspiration by this astonishing person Dr. Vent Kattaswamy of Madhura, India and He was a cataract surgeon who realized that if he went to mass production That he could reduce the cost of it all instead of $300 lenses They'd be $2 instead of $1900 for cataract surgery It could be $20 which it turned out to be and because of that He could give it for free to the people who couldn't afford it and the people who afford anything would pay 50 60 80 dollars That's it and and in his in his legacy of this hospital system He has given eyesight to 2 million people for free This is astonishing and so what it does is change the question of commerce itself from how much can I get for how little I give a World of limits to one of generosity and abundance How much can we give for all that we get a world of generosity of fairness and as we look at the Entropic activity of the burning of the world those light bulbs. You see our fires. They are fires Mark is right And we can look at all alternate systems. Of course we can't we can think about what more good looks like But at the same time as we celebrate We should remember all of these things here our chemicals And we all come back To the ground and as we think about rising into the sky We also have to remember what it means to come down to the ground and get grounded in Fundamental principles that drive our design And as we think about the world Let us re-see the world. Let us glance Let us see let us gaze Let us think about this beauty But let's remember what we need to do now is start with our children to Think again about the future So let us think After we think Let us do because it's time for action and I think with these kinds of protocols We can now get to work once again. Thank you very much