The Better by Design summit continues in Auckland today, with its focus on sustainability.
Keynote speaker Prof Dr Michael Braungart is famous for his book 'Cradle to cradle: remaking the way we make things" which is considered a must read about business and sustainability.
Prof Braungart makes the case that business can be transformed through intelligent design for "Triple to line results; a profitable synthesis of economic, ecological and social value.
Instead of trying to be less bad, Cradle to Cradle asks how to do the most good.
They term this approach Eco-effectiveness. Eco-effectiveness means doing the right thing instead of optimizing the bad. It means eliminating the concept of waste and moves beyond goals such as zero impact or carbon neutral. It means celebrating human genius, and remaking the way we make things to benefit nature, people and business.
Dr Michael Braungart is founder of EPEA International Umweltforschung GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), and co-founder of MBDC; McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. He has initiated worldwide scholarly and scientific inquiry into the adverse environmental and physiological impacts of industrially-produced consumer goods.
Dr Braungart has been a professor of Process Engineering at Universität Lüneburg (Germany) since 1994. His work has been published in numerous journals on science, public affairs, design and environment in Europe and the US.