Ben had been caught by a delayed delivery man and was unable to make it over so we skyped him in on my laptop and occasionally he would pipe up with ideas as they came to him or useful nuggets of information that I had overlooked. It was a little surreal, as though HAL from 2001 or KITT from Knightrider were suddenly spouting away on the table. I don’t know if he got the full impact of the meeting, but to me it was like seeing something so innately familiar for the first time, jamais vu maybe. It was also deeply humbling to see the company that designed the first laptop, the first mouse dedicating manhours to SOUTH for no other reason than they believed in our dream.

Walking through the city tonight, my ipod choosing pitch-perfect tracks for me, it felt like seeing London for the first time too. I got to the station but just carried on walking; I felt like a tourist, and I realised that London doesn’t really start until one floor up. If you walk along Regent street you can see dingy woolen goods shops mixing with over-priced suitmakers, but one floor up and it’s an infinitely long palace of french balconies, stone-wrought urns and architectural intricacies that seem to be the last true vestige of empire. Up Portland Place, past the conical All Souls Church standing guard over the BBC and the windows are interspersed with wreaths and ornate overhangs, through Park crescent with its gleaming porticoes that really show you what old money means until Regents Park interjects a vista of darkness among the lights and London has never seemed so much a part of me. On expeditions I often imagine streets in London in the most vivid of detail, today I was reminded why that’s no bad thing.

Bill is an architect who approaches sustainable design from a very different angle. Instead of looking at how we reduce waste, why don’t we find a way to destroy the concept of waste. Instead of classic recycling, which merely turns a high-end product into a low-end product and delays the journey to the landfill, why don’t we design our products for infinite usage so that they never see the inside of a dump?

By thinking of products as containing either biological or technical nutrients, Bill looks at how, by replacing current toxins and heavy metals that retard our ability to reuse resources and are often carcinogenic to boot, we can create products that, upon reaching their end of their lifecycle, can be returned to the factory and broken down again into materials that will create the next generation of product with no diminishment of quality.

One key example is a carpet that you lease instead of buy. The rubber mat is a biological nutrient that you could potentially throw out in your garden and instead of polluting the land would nourish it as it degraded, the top fibres are a technological nutrient that when returned to the factory can be broken down and used as raw material for a new carpet of similar quality. This design process works for the company as the reduced scarcity of materials makes for a lower cost base and works for the consumer who is no longer bringing carcinogenic toxins into their homes.

I love the way Bill attacks this problem because it fits perfectly with big business. He shows that ecologically intelligent design should not constrain but free companies. Bill’s world is one of no regulation (who needs regulation when you’re not producing any pollution) and plentiful resources.

Fittingly, after showing a distaste for taking something that accrues solar energy, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distils water, creates microclimates, produces complex sugars and self-replicates, and knocking it down and writing on it, his book Cradle to Cradle is made of an infinitely reusable polymer. It is a book that just might change not only your life but that of your great-grandchildren.