Michael Braungart

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Michael Braungart is a German chemist who advocates 'upcycling' not recycling, to minimize humanity's ecological footprint. Once a Greenpeace activist who lived in a tree as protest, he is now a respected industrial designer and professor of process engineering.

Michael Braungart is a chemist and founder of EPEA International Umweltforschung GmbH in Hamburg, Germany, and co-founder of MBDC McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry in Charlottesville, Virginia.

After completing studies in Process Engineering in Darmstadt, Germany, Dr. Braungart went on to investigate the chemical processes of industrial production techniques with the Chemistry Department at Konstanz, Germany. He subsequently lead the formation of the Chemistry Section of Greenpeace International. By the time he completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Hannover in 1985, he had assumed leadership of Greenpeace Chemistry.

Dr. Braungart is currently a professor of Process Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Suderburg (Fachhochschule Nordostniedersachsen), also serving as director of an interdisciplinary materials flow management masters program. He has also accepted a visiting professorship at the Darden School of Business, lecturing on such topics as eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, Cradle-to-Cradle design and Intelligent Materials Pooling.

In 1987, Dr. Braungart founded the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in Hamburg. At the heart of EPEA is Cradle to Cradle Design, which creates products oriented toward a life-cycle economy.

In addition to his achievements with EPEA, Dr. Braungart also serves as Scientific Manager of the Hamburg Environmental Institute, the non-profit research center which produces the "Top 50 Study". This study ranks the quality of environmentally-sound production of companies within the chemical industry.

Dr. Braungart also works together with American architect and designer William A. McDonough in their product design and development firm, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. He has initiated scholarly and scientific inquiry into the adverse environmental and physiological impacts of industrially-produced consumer goods.

Dr. Braungart's EPEA co-authored the Hannover Principles of Design: Design for Sustainability, which served as development guidelines for the World's Fair in Hannover, 2000. In 2002, he also co-authored Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things with William McDonough.