A Quote by William McDonough

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

William McDonough

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Because Beginning Communities Complicated Consumption Conversion Degraded Describe Designed Energy Even Expensive Few Force Improved Industrial Itself Lifetimes Materials Messy Mind Modern Money More Must Needs Objects Partly Process Products Quality Rather Recycled Recycling Resources Return Save Systems Term Than Traditional Tries Truly Use Very Were

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William McDonough
American - Designer
Born: February 21, 1951

My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.

John McCarthy

When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling.

Barbara Amiel

The Pacific coral reef, as a kind of oasis in a desert, can stand as an object lesson for man who must now learn that mutualism between autotrophic and heterotrophic components, and between producers and consumers in the societal realm, coupled with efficient recycling of materials and use of energy, are the keys to maintaining prosperity in a world of limited resources.

Eugene Odum

There’s an inherent message in my work relating to recycling and the nature of value, but my artistic inspiration is fired by the qualities within the raw materials… I come across many things which have been abandoned and find something more in them than their intrinsic worthlessness.

Ptolemy

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

Pauline Kael

Reusing and recycling our materials is the most important thing we can do.

Nikki Reed

Recycling helps make people feel involved, and in some cases can be useful. Although you've got to do careful life history studies of what you're recycling. If all you're doing is recycling - if you've got three automobiles, and 10 children, and a 7,000-square-foot dot-com palace and second home up in the mountains that has to be heated - the recycling isn't making much difference.

Paul R. Ehrlich

Modern architecture does not mean the use of immature new materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction.

Alvar Aalto

A real challenge that I've had with my company, Bayou With Love, is getting people to understand that using post-consumer materials does not mean that you are getting a "less than" product than one made with virgin materials. I use a lot of post-consumer plastic in Bayou's clothing. I use it in our bags, which are made from recycled plastics from the ocean.

Nikki Reed

If you're not buying recycled products, you're not really recycling.

Ed Begley, Jr.

We're fortunate enough to live on a planet that's bathed in thousands of times more energy than we use and that's stocked with thousands of times more water, raw materials, and even food-growing potential than we need.

Ramez Naam

People, materials, facilities, money, and time are the resources available to us for conducting our business. By applying our skills, we turn these resources into useful products and services. If we do a good job, customers pay us more for our products than the sum of our costs in producing and distributing them. This difference, our profit, represents the value we add to the resources we utilize.

David Packard

We were in recycling before recycling was cool.

Anthony Pratt

The chemists work with inaccurate and poor measuring services, but they employ very good materials. The physicists, on the other hand, use excellent methods and accurate instruments, but they apply these to very inferior materials. The physical chemists combine both these characteristics in that they apply imprecise methods to impure materials.

Wolfgang Ostwald

When my brother and I were 11, our father designed a 17-foot boat for sailing around the world. He'd never ventured more than a few miles from the U.S. He'd never sailed - or designed a boat before.

Glenn Kelman

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

William S. Burroughs

A Quote by William McDonough

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