Cradle to Cradle, upcycled furniture and green building

Cradle to Cradle design, and its promise of fruitful coexistence between nature and commerce, resonates with us here.

We’re committed to reclaiming and repurposing materials in our upcycled furniture and as a basis for green remodeling and green building.  So we were glad to see that Forbes magazine ran an interview with William McDonough, author of “Cradle To Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”.  McDonough discusses the net-zero energy building he’s designing for the NASA Sustainability Base at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field (pictured here), as well as the “our poop became food” lesson that he learned while growing up in Japan.

His critique of the prescriptive “benchmarking” of LEED and his emphasis on producing net-zero energy buildings is also firmly in line with Passive House principles.

The interview includes a slideshow of products that are Cradle to Cradle certified, including a brand of bottled water (ostensibly due to its recycled plastic content and the fact that Whole Foods will recycle it).  That seems like a stretch … it’s hard to think of bottled water as a “green” product, even if the production of the bottles aligns with Cradle to Cradle principles.  (But let’s not throw the baby out with the bottled water.)

-Zack