It is not an exaggeration to say that some of the most compelling ideas afoot today about how the world could (and should) be reinvented began in the head of William McDonough. An architect by training, McDonough has spent almost three decades showing how we human beings can break our nasty habit of building, manufacturing, and inventing stuff that is toxic and ultimately harmful to the environment and our heath. He suggests an alternative vision: Design the stuff we make-from buildings to shoes-to be safe and produce waste that can in turn be wholly reused. McDonough's seminal book Cradle to Cradle, co-authored with German chemist Michael Braungart, laid out that manifesto in 2002 with this succinct refrain: "Waste equals food."

He's spent a career proving that this simple instruction, cribbed from Nature itself, can be applied to carpeting, office chairs, books, factories, and even plastics. Some of his groundbreaking projects (for well-known brands such as Ford Motor Co., Herman Miller, and Ciba-Geigy) include: inventing a new non-toxic furniture fabric manufactured in such a way that the water used in the process became cleaner after it went through the factory; creating carpet that can, after it wears out, be turned back into new carpet, instead of being "downcycled" into other lower-value products, as is usually the case with recycling; and building a company's corporate headquarters with solar panels and photo-sensors that measure natural light inside and automatically adjust the artificial lighting to use only what's necessary.

"Design is a signal of intention," McDonough likes to say. And his ambitious goal is to help us marshal our intentions to live well and live smarter so that we all become designers of a very different kind of world for the generations to come.

We caught up with McDonough, who is on Blue Egg's board, to hear what revolutionary mischief and juicy projects are invigorating him at the moment. This snippet of our interview is part of the recurring "Where's William?" feature on Blue Egg. With these clips, we hope to capture how "green" is becoming "just the way things are done," through the lens of one of the greatest minds driving that shift.

In this excerpt, McDonough talks about an unexpected conversation he's having with the U.S. military, sparked by a recent interview he gave to The New York Times. In it, he mentioned his interest in persuading the armed forces to embrace solar power; some folks with a fair amount of brass on their epaulets read the interview and were intrigued enough to call. While the details of the project are too nascent to share, he talks about why this one conversation could be a harbinger of change.

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