He presented “A building like a tree, a city like a forest” at the inaugural Holcim Foundation Roundtable 2014) and was presented with the Holcim Foundation Catalyst Award – a recognition for experts who have made a substantial, outstanding, and lasting contribution to the advancement of sustainable development.

Michael Braungart is Co-founder and Scientific Director of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), Co-founder and Scientific Director of the Hamburg Environmental Institute (HUI) and Director of Braungart Consulting.

He is a chemist who advocates that humanity can make a positive instead of a negative environmental impact by redesigning industrial production, ultimately claiming that human activities should not generate waste. He researches and advises on eco-effective products in the cycle that are not only less harmful to people and nature, but are instead useful.

Michael Bruangart is Professor for Cradle to Cradle and Eco-Effectiveness at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. He is a Visiting Professor at Erasmus University, and formerly held the Chair for Cradle to Cradle – Innovation and Quality (2011-17). He has held teaching positions at TU Delft, University of Twente Enschede, Carnegie Mellon University, Bauhaus University Weimar, and the University of Wales.

He studied chemistry and process engineering at universities in Konstanz, Darmstadt, Hannover, and Zurich. In the 1980s, he dedicated his work to the environmental organization Greenpeace and beginning in 1982 helped to establish the chemistry section of Greenpeace International, which he took over in 1985.

He co-authored Hannover Principles of Design: Design for Sustainability (1992) and Cradle to Cradle: Simply Produce Intelligently (North Point, 2002) with William McDonough.