Hands Off Cradle to Cradle

Bill McDonough, father of the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) design approach, is said to have the ambition to become ‘The Bill Gates of Sustainability’. McDonough refers of course to the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men. McDonough’s sustainable C2C design approach promotes design that goes beyond the life time of the product itself.

Bill Gates’ Microsoft has become big, rich and powerful by fiercely defending its brain trust, often crushing competitors on the go. McDonough has opted for the same approach, as the Dutch have experienced. The Netherlands is one of the few countries where C2C has been adopted enthusiastically. Its government has announced that all public projects ought to be C2C by 2012. Consequently many kinds of service providers have started to call themselves C2C practitioners. McDonough’s lawyers responded by  sending them letters, effectively telling them that C2C is a proprietary brand, so hands off. Quite sobering for long time C2C supporters like myself.

McDonough’s attitude has lead to other initiatives, most notably GreenBlue. It is similar to C2C, with the distinction that GreenBlue has actually posted some useful guidelines on its website. GreenBlue’s lingo differs slightly from C2C due to copyright restrictions, and so Cradle2Cradle is called Green2Green. Sadly however, GreenBlue has made no efforts to exploit it’s Open Source approach. For example, there is no user community that exchanges ideas to further develop the concept. C2C does have a user community, but in my experience the discussions remain very superficial due to the proprietary nature of C2C. GreenBlue clearly missed an opportunity to take ownership of the debate.

As a result of McDonough’s attitude, the adoption of C2C has has come to a standstill. But just as Microsoft has been forced into making concessions to the Open Source community, so is McDonough. He recently announced that C2C is to go into the public domain next year. This won’t necessarily be bad news for McDonough. The recipe doesn’t make the Chef. McDonough is still the uncontested father of the concept, he has most of the experience applying it, and any serious client will consider him first.

On the other hand, if McDonough’s efforts to Open Source C2C are sincere, this will provide an opportunity for a broader public debate, and mass innovation on the concept. This in turn might lead to the workable models and methods that McDonough has been failing to provide.

It’s about time.

Maurits, the author, is a Dutch architect currently working and living in the UK. As he has a daytime job and a family, most work on this blog is being done at night. More info here.