Michael Braungart
Co-founder of the Cradle-to-Cradle concept

Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart has been a professor of Process Engineering at Universität Lüneburg (Germany) since 1994, and he is also serving as director of an interdisciplinary materials flow management masters program. He is the scientific director of EPEA International Umweltforschung GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), which was founded in 1987 and co-founder of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) in Charlottesville, Virginia. He co-founded the Hamburger Umwelt Insitute (HUI) in 1989, as well.

These organizations share a common set of values that embrace intelligent, aesthetic and eco-effective design and seek to optimize products with the Cradle to Cradle framework. Through these activities, Professor Braungart has developed tools to design eco-effective products and business systems and has worked with a number of organizations and companies in a range of industries. He has 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, and he continues to teach at universities all over the world.