Removing excess carbon from the atmosphere is a daunting but "very exciting" design challenge, according to sustainable-design guru William McDonough.
Describing climate change as a "design failure," the American architect and designer said that solving it will involve "hundreds of technologies and systems."
"It's a design project needing lots of attention," McDonough told Dezeen via a video call from his home in Virginia. "It's very exciting to look at how many ways we can do this, but it's daunting".
The root of the problem is what McDonough describes as "fugitive carbon". This is anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere that "meets the description of a toxin: it's the wrong material, wrong place, wrong dose, wrong duration." William McDonough (top) wrote seminal 2020 book Cradle to Cradle (above) with chemist Michael Braungart
The educator and writer, whose seminal 2002 book Cradle to Cradle is regarded as the precursor to the circular design movement, turned his attention to carbon in 2016 when he wrote a ground-breaking article for the science journal Nature.
"Climate change is the result of breakdowns in the carbon cycle caused by us," he wrote in the article, which was echoed in a speech given around the same time at the COP22 climate-change conference in Marrakech. "It is a design failure."
Carbon is "an innocent element in all this"
He further set out his thinking in ...