KEY POINTS:
When his friend, photographer Fernando Pereira, died on board Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior 23 years ago, Michael Braungart vowed never to return to New Zealand.
But the former Greenpeace activist has come back - intent on spreading his take on the way the next industrial revolution should run.
Braungart, principal of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry and a professor of process engineering at Universitat Luneburg in Germany, makes the case that businesses can be transformed through intelligent design, and in the process reap triple top line results - a synthesis of economic, ecological and social value.
This approach he dubs "cradle to cradle".
Speaking at the Better by Design CEO Summit in Auckland yesterday, Braungart said the traditional cradle to grave manufacturing model takes materials and converts it into products which ultimately end up in landfills.
But the approach of European countries to countering this approach is ecologism, which Braungart said tells people to consume and hence, pollute less. This, he said, was "guilt management".
He champions instead eco-effectiveness - "no avoidance, no minimising, no guilt management". This approach, he argued, eliminates the concept of waste, and moves beyond goals such as zero impact or carbon neutral, to remaking the way things are manufactured.
Products can be designed from the outset so that after their useful lives, can form the basis of nourishment for something new. This can either take the form of biological nutrients that will easily re-enter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins - such as compostable fabric in carpets and apparel - or technical nutrients that will continually circulate as materials within closed loop industrial cycles, rather than being recycled into low grade materials and uses.
Jan Peter Balkenende, Prime Minister of Holland, has pledged that all government purchasing decisions will be cradle-to-cradle by 2012.
That's $60 billion of purchasing power, said Braungart.
And there needs to be units the size of New Zealand to lead the way.
"Don't apologise for being on this planet. Be better by design."
