BeeP Blog

For those who couldn’t attend our Sustainable Brands workshop, we’re offering up some of the slides from our presentation, “Sustainability Leadership: The Making, Marketing and Thinking Behind Cradle to Cradle Products,” to further share some overview thinking on what Cradle to Cradle is, how it works, and why it’s so important.

Check out this presentation from Jay Bolus, the VP of Technical Operations from MBDC.  Jay’s presentation provides a very good description of Cradle to Cradle Certification and the benefits for companies and consumers.

Hope you enjoy.

Yesterday was an unbelievably wonderful day for us at Blue Practice.  Our client William McDonough and his team at MBDC, including CEO Ken Alston, Jay Bolus, and Steve Bolton, gifted the Cradle to Cradle framework, with IP valued at over $100MM dollars, to the public interest by forming the Green Products Innovation Institute.

The whole team was recognized by Governor Schwarzenegger and supported by leaders like Wendy Schmidt (wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and YouTube founder Chad Hurley, along with Cradle to Cradle pioneers and supporters like Wal-Mart, SAP, Shaw Industries, Aveda, and Method, at a green-star-studded launch event at the Google campus.

If you have access to the Wall St. Journal online, I recommend reading Jim Carlton’s piece about the GPII and how it fits in with California’s regulations on toxic substances.

As a business advisory council member, we’ve been part of this transformation from the very beginning.  It is hard to believe that just six short months ago we were sitting around Jillian Manus’s dining room table hatching plans for this nonprofit organization with a small group of incredible people, including Warner Philips, Bridget Luther, Zem Joaquim, Adam Lowry, and Beth Rattner (now ED of the GPII).

Now, the GPII stands to empower others in helping develop products that do more good, rather than less bad. read more

The Green Products Innovation Institute will launch today, spreading Cradle to Cradle practices throughout industry.  We’ll be tweeting today from the event at the Google Campus.  Check it out @bluepractice

The Financial Times broke the story last night:

It is hardly the most orthodox route to business success. Having spent two decades building a company with a leading position in a highly promising global industry, Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart have decided to take a back seat – not by selling out but by donating the intellectual property behind their enterprise to a non-profit organisation.

Mr McDonough, a US architect, and Mr Braungart, a German chemist, head McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, an environmental consultancy based in Charlottesville, Virginia, which measures the “environmental footprint” of a product’s supply chain. Their process is based on an exceptionally rigorous set of criteria and is allied to a set of procedures for creating new chemicals that they call a “cradle-to-cradle” system.

Until now, their methods have been a closely guarded secret. But they hope today’s launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute in San Francisco will be a mechanism to create hundreds of other businesses around the world using their method. The idea is to spread the philosophy much faster – and wider – than if the original entrepreneurs kept control of their ideas.

Registered FT readers can read the rest of the piece here.