McDonough Launches Nonprofit GreenBlue

On May 2, 2003, at the EnvironDesign® 7 conference in Washington, D.C., William McDonough announced the launch of a nonprofit organization to facilitate dissemination of the design approaches and resources his companies have developed. “We’re launching the GreenBlue program today to give away the cradle-to-cradle protocol freely,” McDonough said, referring to the design protocol he developed with German chemist Michael Braungart, cofounder of the consulting firm McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, LLC (MBDC). With his signature mix of visionary ideas, compelling presentation, and chutzpah, McDonough explained that they’ve had difficulty protecting their intellectual property with the cradle-to-cradle (C2C) protocol because it is so fundamental that it constitutes a scientific “discovery” rather than an invention.

The name “GreenBlue” refers to the two types of useful material described in the C2C framework, biological nutrients (green) and technical nutrients (blue). The basic principles of MBDC’s cradle-to-cradle framework are described in McDonough and Braungart’s 2002 book,

Cradle to Cradle (see