Buildings That Can Breathe

And the idea here is nothing gets wasted?
Exactly. The other questions we ask are: Is it powered by renewable energy? Does it have reverse logistics—do you have a way to get it back to soil or back to industry? Is the water clean? One of our first [Cradle to Cradle-certified] products was a textile for Steelcase corporation in Switzerland. The water coming out of the textile mill is as clean as the water going in, which is Swiss drinking water. Now when a textile mill has effluent that's clean enough to drink, you're entering the next industrial revolution. All of a sudden, there's nothing to fear from human production.

You say we need to move to renewable energy, and seem to focus on solar. Why?
Direct solar is distributed, it's generally available to most of the planet and it can be applied at the local level. I think about our highway system—phenomenal achievement, but also phenomenal opportunity, because we can [put up solar panels along] all the highways. We can solar-power the railroads. Amtrak can basically let out its airspace for solar collectors. It's already got infrastructure, it's already got power, it's already got distribution. It's an opportunity waiting to happen.

When Jimmy Carter was in the White House, he put solar panels on the roof of the White House. When Reagan came, he took them off. You'd put them back on?
I think that as an emblem and as a signal, it's probably a good thing to do. But I think that we ought to relax a little when we insist on modernizing historic buildings. I got a call from a college president who was saying they were going to renovate a building which he thought was very beautiful. It had high ceilings and tall windows, and they were going to put in aluminum fixed windows, drop the ceilings down to 10 feet from 15 to put in AC. It was going to cost $5 million to make the building energy-efficient. My response to him was: "Don't do it! You'll destroy the building! Go raise $1 million and put up a megawatt of wind power on a family farm in western Minnesota. Let that farmer … send his kids to college, and pay his mortgage, and you'll produce a megawatt of power, which is more than you'll need for your building."

© 2008