[21] Located in Charlottesville, Virginia, the institute builds on the 2008 California state law establishing the nation's first green chemistry program.

[22][23][24] At the January 2014 World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, McDonough led a workshop for CEOs that was centered around sustainable design, with an added focus on cradle-to-cradle, the upcycle, and the circular economy.

[25][26] Before the meeting, he participated in the organizing process in Geneva, when the WEF partnered with the United Nations to review climate change.

[13] He is also the chief executive of McDonough Innovation, which provides consulting to global companies, organizations, and governments[30].McDonough's first major commission was the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) Headquarters in New York City in 1984.

[32] Since then, William McDonough + Partners has been responsible for numerous milestones in the sustainable movement, such as 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno, California, completed in 1997 for Gap, Inc.; it is now the headquarters for YouTube.

[35][6] The Herman Miller SQA factory in Michigan includes a series of manmade wetlands that process and purify the building’s stormwater.

"[60] Interviewing many of McDonough's former colleagues, the magazine cited his failure to have any meaningful impact with his cradle-to-cradle program, his unsustainable suburban lifestyle, and his habit of misrepresenting his professional successes.

It also noted that just 160 of his planned 30,000 products were green-certified, and that he trademarked the term "cradle-to-cradle" even though it was coined by Swiss architect Walter Stahel many years beforehand.

In 2008, McDonough's Huangbaiyu project was heavily covered by the press for its many design issues, including conflicts between Feng Shui and passive solar design standards, including garages although no villagers could afford cars, failing to provide space for grazing livestock, and building houses out of potentially unsafe compressed coal dust.

[61] In 2008, a PBS Frontline investigation found that McDonough's poor planning and execution of the Huangbaiyu project had doomed it to failure from the start.

[67][68] Fortune named McDonough one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders in 2019 in recognition of his contributions to the green building movement, being a leading proponent of the circular economy, and his efforts to redesign plastics.