Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things – a Case for Truly Sustainable Design by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

“The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.” ~Albert Einstein

At its deepest foundation, the industrial infrastructure we have today is linear: it is focused on making a product and getting it to a customer quickly and cheaply without considering much else.” Unless this changes, we will inevitably confront the full meaning of the term “cradle to grave,” as our once-fecund planet becomes increasingly unable to sustain human life . . . . the 4Rs : “reduce, reuse, recycle and regulate” is only postponing the inevitable stockpiling of unusable and unsafe debris on the land, in the sea, and in the air, it only delays our inevitable degradation of the planet’s systems and resources . . . . because in a closed system you can only go so far in relegating stuff to a grave, eventually the whole Earth will be one massive grave . . . . It presents little more than an illusion of change.

At present a world where valuable raw materials are thrown into the “grave” of landfills simply because the designers did not have enough foresight to plan for their reuse . . . . waste (which is what most pollution is) is a product of bad design . . . . instead of “reduce, reuse, recycle and regulate”, the authors shows us the way to “rethink and redesign” the products of industry.

The authors, an architect and a chemist, want to eliminate the concept of waste altogether, while preserving commerce and allowing for human nature . . . . The key is the right kind of (economic) growth — and the key to that is better design . . . . The authors reconcile growth with environmental preservation by envisioning products that are in harmony with the earth’s cycles of regeneration . . . . sustainable profit is ONLY possible if you go green . . . . what the authors claim is a truly sustainable form of capitalism.

Cradle-to-Cradle is a phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constiuent components back into service.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

“The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.” ~Albert Einstein

The Problem, the Cause, Partial Solutions and the Paradox

This era, as the authors describe it, has been characterized by one size fits all planning (which wastes enormously on diverse points along the spectrum of actual need); by design for worst case conditions ; by the application of brute force to the land (with all that implies in energy consumption); by a monoculture concept (lawns with pesticide instead of natural gardens as eco-systems), and relatively crude products . . . . At its deepest foundation, the industrial infrastructure we have today is linear: it is focused on making a product and getting it to a customer quickly and cheaply without considering much else.” Unless this changes, we will inevitably confront the full meaning of the term “cradle to grave,” as our once-fecund planet becomes increasingly unable to sustain human life.

According to Cradle to Cradle, waste (which is what most pollution is) is a product of bad design . . . . The authors see at present a world where valuable raw materials are thrown into the “grave” of landfills simply because the designers did not have enough foresight to plan for their reuse . . . . Traditionally, designers of economic processes tried to increase profits and reduce costs. The easiest way to do that was to “externalize” waste as pollution. But as “away” gets closer to home, that becomes less acceptable. Change the game, say McDonough and Braungart, by changing the objectives; don’t seek only to profit financially. Ask yourself, “How can we love all the children, of all species, for all time?”

They start by challenging the modern day environmental response of “reduce, reuse, recycle”, doing more with less in order to minimize damage. They say, although an improvement, this approach is only postponing the inevitable stockpiling of unusable and unsafe debris on the land, in the sea, and in the air, it only delays our inevitable degradation of the planet’s systems and resources. It perpetuates the one-way “cradle to grave” manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic waste and pollution in the first place . . . . Sure a soda bottle may “downcycle” into a carpet, or a sneaker sole may comeback as part of a park bench, but eventually it will become junk – too degraded to reformulate into something useful, and too inert to biodegrade into something harmless . . . . It presents little more than an illusion of change.

(They also think that) regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an acceptable rate . . . . Regulations are enacted to control waste, but the message of regulation is, “Be less bad.” Good design, the authors argue, says, “Be good.”

Solving the Paradox

The authors’ bottom lines here are that being less bad is not good enough, because in a closed system you can only go so far in relegating stuff to a grave, eventually the whole Earth will be one massive grave . . . . Instead of focusing on slowing the rate at which we destroy the planet, why not design industries that actually help it? Rather than seeing the world in terms of natural capital to be expended (at whatever rate) until its inevitable exhaustion, and seeing our own presence on earth as inherently destructive, we can design an integrated model in which everything we take from the earth can remain in use, albeit in different form.

The authors, an architect and a chemist, want to eliminate the concept of waste altogether, while preserving commerce and allowing for human nature . . . . What the authors propose in this clear, accessible manifesto is a new approach they’ve dubbed “eco-effectiveness”: designing from the ground up for both eco-safety and cost efficiency . . . . What McD and B propose as revolutionary is — instead of reducing pollution and consumption and having fewer children — making increased economic activity actually beneficial to the planet . . . . With their intelligent designs, “bigger and better” is possible “in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.” . . . . The key is the right kind of (economic) growth — and the key to that is better design . . . . The authors reconcile growth with environmental preservation by envisioning products that are in harmony with the earth’s cycles of regeneration . . . . sustainable profit is ONLY possible if you go green . . . . the authors do a great job of changing the terms of the debate from “reduce, reuse, recycle” to “rethink and redesign” the use of the product.

Instead of conventional bottom line criteria in say, building design, of cost, aesthetics, and performance, they recommend a “triple top line” strategy of ecology, equity, and economy, where one starts off the building process with questions such as “How can I create habitat?” and “How do I create jobs?” instead of simply “How do I create money?” or by sheepishly mitigating any harm. But–and this is important–this is not an anti-commercialism, anti-growth tirade. Cradle to Cradle does not say that one side or the other in the supposed commerce versus environment conflict has to bend to the other’s wishes, it says that both (all) sides have to change their way of thinking – it has to evolve beyond the thinking that caused the conflict to begin with . . . . It is relevant to the greediest capitalist and to the most altruistic naturalist – it frightens no one away. And for the rest of us in between who simply want to pursue a craft or profession and not mess things up too much in the process, Cradle to Cradle may, in fact should, become a handbook for the future.

The Solution : Cradle to Cradle Design

Cradle-to-Cradle is a phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s and popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book of the same name. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constiuent components back into service.

Products can be designed from the outset so that after useful lives, they will provide “nourishment” for something new. They can be planned as “biological nutrients” that will easily and safely re-enter the water or soil, or they can be “technical nutrients” that will continually circulate as valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles.

This design precept requires a commitment to disassemble the product’s components to be reused in as valuable a form as possible . . . . The key to economic nutrition is keeping biological and technical nutrients separate, so that each can be fully upcycled to remain in the economic food chain . . . . Objects that must contain both biodegradable and inorganic recyclable elements will be easily separable into those respective parts: you’ll toss the soles of your shoes into the garden and give the uppers back to the shoemaker. And the water coming out of factories will be cleaner than what came in, motivating the factory owners to reuse it and eliminating the need for the government to test its toxicity.

The key is “eco-effectiveness”: “not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.” Meanwhile, industries reap their own benefits by reducing the costs of treating, shipping and storing waste and efficiently recapturing valuable raw materials that retain their full industrial utility.

They cite examples from their own work, like rooftops covered with soil and plants that serve as natural insulation; nontoxic dyes and fabrics; their current overhaul of Ford’s legendary River Rouge factory; and the book itself, which will be printed on a synthetic “paper” that doesn’t use trees.

The authors conclude that it is possible to design cradle to cradle products if one commits to converting the products into leased services, with the “producer” being responsible for taking any given product back for proper and full recycling. This gives the producer every incentive for designing products that can be easily broken down, re-used, and purified of all toxins from cradle to cradle.

The localizing of processes, but especially of waste treatment, is another theme that runs strongly here. Not only can neighborhoods create aquatic biological localized waste treatment processes that are beautiful and natural, but since the water they drink comes out the other end, they are individually incentivized to avoid dropping toxins into the natural waste system.

The book concludes with five steps and five guiding principles.

The five steps are:
1) Get rid of known toxins and culprits in every product and service
2) Follow informed personal preferences
3) Do detailed analysis of the positive, neutral, and negative components of any product or process
4) Design around the positive
5) Reinvent constantly–exceed the first fix again and again

The five guiding principles are:
1) Signal intention
2) Restore, restore, restore
3) Innovate and keep innovating
4) Understand and prepare for the learning curve of the client
5) Exert inter-generational (sustainable) responsibility

McDonough and Braungart are careful not to be too glib about technical cure-alls, noting that the sort of change they propose is going to be incremental, spurred on by individual commitments to environmentally sound living. Consumers increasingly recognize that the dollars they spend support a whole system, and that they can choose between organic food and factory farms, coal burning plants and wind generation, fair trade and exploited Third World workers. Today, we can learn a lot about the companies behind the items we purchase, and once we know, it’s hard not to make conscious — and conscientious — choices. Companies are starting to grasp this, and Cradle to Cradle is one blueprint for how they, and the rest of us, can profit from that consciousness.

As compelling as the vision is, there’s still the small matter of making it real. Instead of being pursued after the fact, the way recycling is, eco-efficiency must be built into the industrial process from the ground up, and survive countless economic and competitive pressures over the course of an imperfect and disruptive adoption process. Every product must be designed to be dismantled, and the means of its production paired with the means of its disintegration. Executives – and the stockholders they answer to – must be persuaded that altruism and profitability can go hand-in-hand. Decades of mutual mistrust among industry, activists and the government must be overcome.

It sounds like an impossible task and, indeed, the book stays just a small step in front of the “yeah, right” reflex ?\ but in fact, McDonough and Braungart have put many of their ideas into action with clients including Hermann Miller, for whom they designed an eco-effective factory in Germany, and the Ford Motor Company, whose chairman is a big fan. The book itself is a successful case study, printed on plastic polymer pages that can be unbound, rinsed, and re-used to publish new books long into the future.

Investors with foresight can support the transformation from an economy that presages its own funeral (cradle-to-grave) to an economy that celebrates its perpetual reincarnation (cradle-to-cradle). And these investors can profit financially while encouraging the adaptation of what the authors claim is a truly sustainable form of capitalism.

“At some point a manufacturer or designer decides, ‘We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep supporting this system.’ At some point they will decide that they would prefer to leave behind a positive design legacy. But when is that point?” they ask at one point, answering their question in the next sentence,” write McDonough and Braungart.

“We say that point is today, and negligence starts tomorrow.”

(This article is a summary and re-arrangement of the following reviews of the book)

[tags]capitalism, economic growth, consumerism, ecosocial crisis, zero waste, industry, commerce, trade, production, design, civilization, ecological economics, cradle to cradle, technical nutrients, biomimicry, planet, profit, externalities, co-intelligence[/tags]

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Cradle-to-Cradle :

A phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s and popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book of the same name. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constiuent components back into service.

A definition from SustainabilityDictionary.com

Paper or plastic? Neither, say William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Why settle for the least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better–say, edible grocery bags!

Recycling, for instance, is actually “downcycling,” creating hybrids of biological and technical “nutrients” which are then unrecoverable and unusable. The authors, an architect and a chemist, want to eliminate the concept of waste altogether, while preserving commerce and allowing for human nature. They offer several compelling examples of corporations that are not just doing less harm–they’re actually doing some good for the environment and their neighborhoods, and making more money in the process.

They argue that conventional, expensive eco-efficiency measures things like recycling or emissions reduction are inadequate for protecting the long-term health of the planet. Our industrial products are simply not designed with environmental safety in mind; there’s no way to reclaim the natural resources they use or fully prevent ecosystem damage, and mitigating the damage is at best a stop-gap measure. What the authors propose in this clear, accessible manifesto is a new approach they’ve dubbed “eco-effectiveness”: designing from the ground up for both eco-safety and cost efficiency. They cite examples from their own work, like rooftops covered with soil and plants that serve as natural insulation; nontoxic dyes and fabrics; their current overhaul of Ford’s legendary River Rouge factory; and the book itself, which will be printed on a synthetic “paper” that doesn’t use trees.

These authors teemed up on the 1991 Hannover Principles to guide the design of the 2000 World’s Fair. McDonough has an architecture firm in Charlottesville, Va., and from 1994 to 1999 was dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture. Braungart is a German chemist who for several years headed the chemistry section of Greenpeace.

From reviews:

This doesn’t feel like a book – literally. It’s a different size and shape, the pages are thick, the thing feels significantly heavier than it looks, and it’s waterproof.

In the future envisioned and partially created and described by this pair of authors, packaging will be tossed on the ground in response to signs reading “Please litter!” Appliances will be leased and returned to manufacturers to be completely recycled. Objects that must contain both biodegradable and inorganic recyclable elements will be easily separable into those respective parts: you’ll toss the soles of your shoes into the garden and give the uppers back to the shoemaker. And the water coming out of factories will be cleaner than what came in, motivating the factory owners to reuse it and eliminating the need for the government to test its toxicity.

What McD and B propose as revolutionary is — instead of reducing pollution and consumption and having fewer children — making increased economic activity actually beneficial to the planet.

Reducing pollution to zero is not a “new paradigm” from reducing pollution to a teeny bit – it’s just better.

this book does not suggest any radical change in behavior for the typical reader. (Have lots of kids, drive lots of cars, buy lots of stuff – what a break through!) This book is, rather, advice for architects, corporations, and municipalities . . . . the vision of rendering mad self-indulgence completely beneficial to all other species is far from a reality, and even the dream described by McD and B would not, in any way that I can imagine, make it possible to place an unlimited number of humans on the planet without hurting anything – more humans than under current practices, yes — an infinite number, no. But let’s remember that most of the people now on the planet do not do nearly as much damage as we do in this country. How many billion Americans the Earth can hold has not been answered.

Immediately following the “inherently honest” comment (page 60) Mc D and B go on to equate regulation with partial pollution reduction, and to conclude that because complete pollution reduction is desirable and possible, regulation is bad. Instead they should conclude that rather than allowing limited pollution, regulators should ban it entirely (through whatever stages of phasing in that policy prove feasible).

“We see a world of abundance, not limits” they say. As an architect (McDonough) and chemist (Braungart) they don’t have any special qualifications for this re-thinking and re-doing. What they simply have done is re-imagine the whole manufacturing process beginning with the design elements. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of asking the right questions and looking at things differently. They are not talking about smaller-scale industry or limiting themselves to the “four R’s” of traditional environmentalism – reuse, recycle, reduce, and regulate. With their intelligent designs, “bigger and better” is possible “in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.”

the authors do a great job of changing the terms of the debate from “reduce, reuse, recycle” to “rethink and redesign” the use of the product. Their focus on quality design changes the paradigm of how to be environmentally conscious or conscientious and makes you rethink every single facet of living life on Earth beyond just “sustainability”, “green construction” or “going organic”.

The authors make a big point about having printed this book on a (theoretically) recyclable plastic material, as an improvement over books printed on paper. The idea is that we should make things out of materials that allow re-use without downgrading. Paper fibers get shorter every time they are recyclable, so paper becomes lower grade paper, becomes grocery bags, becomes flimsy cardboard, and eventually becomes unusable(or perhaps becomes compost, which feeds the soil to grow new trees).

1) Recyclable plastics are marked with a number to identify them. There is no such marking on the book. Therefore, regardless of the authors’ assertion, it is NOT recyclable, because no recycling site would accept it or know how to process it. 3) Even if the plastic used in this book were recyclable, the process of recycling it would either require chemical inputs to bleach out the ink and restore it to usability, OR else it would downgrade into a grey material. You can’t get around entropy.

Their premise is this: the traditional “cradle to grave” manufacturing paradigm–manufacturing including construction here–ultimately does one thing – it produces waste. And, the modern day environmental response to this–to reduce, reuse, recycle, and strive for efficiency–simply delays the inevitable stockpiling of unusable and unsafe debris on the land, in the sea, and in the air. Sure a soda bottle may “downcycle” into a carpet, or a sneaker sole may comeback as part of a park bench, but eventually it will become junk – too degraded to reformulate into something useful, and too inert to biodegrade into something harmless. So does this make the “three-Rs” bad? Not quite. The authors argue that they and other commonplace sustainability measures are “less bad,” and if we really wanted a world without waste (which is ultimately THE environmental solution) we would mimic nature where waste equals food. In this way, factories, buildings, and consumer products and services would all be 100 percent good.

It may sound crazy but be assured that this is as lucid an examination of how we live on the planet, as you will find. McDonough and Braungart propose the creation of “technical nutrients” that flow through everything we produce – the “technosphere” (consumosphere? manufactosphere?) much as nutrients continuously cycle through the biosphere with not a trace of toxicity, and with full reusability. The crux of the book deals with this “technical metabolism” of the planet with examples ranging from books to buildings, cars to computers. Ford, DuPont, Dell, Nike… and even the city of Chicago are on board with this thinking

From ecological to economical to social thinking, they see the danger of segregated “isms”–environmentalism, capitalism, etc.–being at odds with each other, and they advocate for a more eco-effective system of commerce that does not “shun environmental, social, and cultural concerns.” Instead of conventional bottom line criteria in say, building design, of cost, aesthetics, and performance, they recommend a “triple top line” strategy of ecology, equity, and economy, where one starts off the building process with questions such as “How can I create habitat?” and “How do I create jobs?” instead of simply “How do I create money?” or by sheepishly mitigating any harm. But–and this is important–this is not an anti-commercialism, anti-growth tirade. Cradle to Cradle does not say that one side or the other in the supposed commerce versus environment conflict has to bend to the other’s wishes, it says that both (all) sides have to change their way of thinking – it has to evolve beyond the thinking that caused the conflict to begin with.

It is relevant to the greediest capitalist and to the most altruistic naturalist – it frightens no one away. And for the rest of us in between who simply want to pursue a craft or profession and not mess things up too much in the process, Cradle to Cradle may, in fact should, become a handbook for the future.

Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things at Amazon.com

McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that “takes, makes and wastes” can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value.

It is printed on a synthetic ‘paper,’ made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, designed to look and feel like top quality paper while also being waterproof and rugged. And the book can be easily recycled in localities with systems to collect polypropylene, like that in yogurt containers. This ‘treeless’ book points the way toward the day when synthetic books, like many other products, can be used, recycled, and used again without losing any material quality – in cradle-to-cradle cycles.

http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm

The idea that growth can be good is anathema to most environmentalists. Yet that’s exactly the argument made by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle. Take a look at nature, the pair says, and you’ll see that growth is not only good, but necessary — that nature’s very abundance is what environmentalists (and the rest of us) depend on and celebrate. The key is the right kind of growth — and the key to that is better design.

Take the authors’ analysis of recycling. Recycling is good, right? In fact, they say, it is often very, very bad. For example, recycling plastic bottles into that groovy fleece jacket means bringing toxic antimony into contact with your skin. Oops. Or how about being more efficient? We know that’s always good, don’t we? Um, actually, no: “Being less bad is not being good,” McDonough told the National Press Club last spring. “If you want to go to Mexico, and you’re driving toward Canada, even if you slow down you’re still going to Canada.”

We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans design products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe that our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?”

Their strategy is eminently graspable, for it is based on the straightforward principles that waste is food, that there is no “away,” that everything is part of a cycle. Of course, these are hardly new ideas; indeed, there has been a recent proliferation of voices arguing that a sustainable economy must mimic nature’s ways. What McDonough and Braungart add to that chorus is a cogent argument for designing our way toward that economy.

According to Cradle to Cradle, waste (which is what most pollution is) is a product of bad design. Regulations are enacted to control waste, but the message of regulation is, “Be less bad.” Good design, the authors argue, says, “Be good.” Traditionally, designers of economic processes tried to increase profits and reduce costs. The easiest way to do that was to “externalize” waste as pollution. But as “away” gets closer to home, that becomes less acceptable. Change the game, say McDonough and Braungart, by changing the objectives; don’t seek only to profit financially. Ask yourself, “How can we love all the children, of all species, for all time?”

That’s a little woo-woo, perhaps (and happily, there’s very little of that in this book), but it sums up the paradigm shift proposed by Cradle to Cradle. Impressively, that shift is being implemented in material ways in decidedly non-woo-woo companies such as Herman Miller, Steelcase, Ford, and Nike.

McDonough and Braungart are careful not to be too glib about technical cure-alls, noting that the sort of change they propose is going to be incremental, spurred on by individual commitments to environmentally sound living. Consumers increasingly recognize that the dollars they spend support a whole system, and that they can choose between organic food and factory farms, coal burning plants and wind generation, fair trade and exploited Third World workers. Today, we can learn a lot about the companies behind the items we purchase, and once we know, it’s hard not to make conscious — and conscientious — choices. Companies are starting to grasp this, and Cradle to Cradle is one blueprint for how they, and the rest of us, can profit from that consciousness.

This era, as the authors describe it, has been characterized by one size fits all planning (which wastes enormously on diverse points along the spectrum of actual need); by design for worst case conditions (more waste when they do not materialize 80% of the time); by the application of brute force to the land (with all that implies in energy consumption); by a monoculture concept (lawns with pesticide instead of natural gardens as eco-systems), and relatively crude products.

The authors’ bottom lines here are that being less bad is not good enough, because in a closed system you can only go so far in relegating stuff to a grave, eventually the whole Earth will be one massive grave.

The four R’s, and they give credit throughout the book to others, are Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Regulate.

They are very specific in stating that downcycling is not true recycling, and most often leads to a cumulative increase of toxins with each reuse.

They are conscious of and discuss conflicting views of growth, but like Paul Hawken, they are clearly pro-business and articulate in pointing out that if Henry Ford can see the value of going green, then all businesses should take this general message seriously: sustainable profit is ONLY possible if you go green.

The authors conclude that it is possible to design cradle to cradle products if one commits to converting the products into leased services, with the “producer” being responsible for taking any given product back for proper and full recycling. This gives the producer every incentive for designing products that can be easily broken down, re-used, and purified of all toxins from cradle to cradle.

The localizing of processes, but especially of waste treatment, is another theme that runs strongly here. Not only can neighborhoods create aquatic biological localized waste treatment processes that are beautiful and natural, but since the water they drink comes out the other end, they are individually incentivized to avoid dropping toxins into the natural waste system.

The book concludes with five steps and five guiding principles.

The five steps are:
1) Get rid of known toxins and culprits in every product and service
2) Follow informed personal preferences
3) Do detailed analysis of the positive, neutral, and negative components of any product or process
4) Design around the positive
5) Reinvent constantly–exceed the first fix again and again

The five guiding principles are:
1) Signal intention
2) Restore, restore, restore
3) Innovate and keep innovating
4) Understand and prepare for the learning curve of the client
5) Exert inter-generational (sustainable) responsibility

Better, By Design : A review of Cradle to Cradle By Hal Clifford, 25 Jul 2002 at Grist.com

Clearly written and compellingly argued, “Cradle to Cradle” eschews jargon to define the problem in simple, straightforward terms: human beings are the only species to remove high-value materials from the earth and replace them with useless and often toxic waste products. And this is true by design: “At its deepest foundation, the industrial infrastructure we have today is linear: it is focused on making a product and getting it to a customer quickly and cheaply without considering much else.” Unless this changes, we will inevitably confront the full meaning of the term “cradle to grave,” as our once-fecund planet becomes increasingly unable to sustain human life.

Our current efforts at remediation, while well-intentioned, miss the target. It’s already an open secret that recycling is a feel-good program of questionable economic or environmental viability. Today’s products are designed in such a way that even the best-intentioned efforts will fail to recover the full value and utility of their component parts. Recycled plastics lose their elasticity, clarity, and tensile strength from generation to generation until they end up in landfills anyway. Recycled paper typically includes residual toxic inks, and its shorter fibers are more easily released and inhaled as the pages are turned. Abandoned automobiles are melted down into indiscriminate alloys of high-tensile steel, copper, and chromium, along with various plastics and paints, that undo the costly work of extracting and refining these metals in the first place. Think you’re doing the right thing by wearing a shirt that incorporates recycled plastic? Think again. Those plastic bottles were rich in chemicals and dyes that were never meant to be worn next to the skin. Moreover, such after-the-fact recycling is expensive, reinforcing the notion that ecology and economy are sworn enemies: “an ecological agenda becomes a burden for industry instead of a rewarding option.” And what about the rest of the stuff – the vast majority of consumer goods that can’t be recycled, not to mention the industrial waste generated by their production, and the toxins released by their everyday use?

The shortcomings of recycling are echoed in other environmental strategies that focus on killing ourselves more slowly rather than addressing the root causes of our demise. “Regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an acceptable rate.” From the 1992 Rio Earth Summit emerged “eco-efficiency,” the new preferred strategy of change for most industries: machines would be refitted with cleaner, faster and quieter engines, and would try to do more with less. Again, we would try to lessen the damage caused by our current modes of production rather than seeking real systemic change to make such damage a thing of the past.

McDonough and Braungart propose a fundamental shift in the way we think about our relationship with the world around us. Instead of focusing on slowing the rate at which we destroy the planet, why not design industries that actually help it? Rather than seeing the world in terms of natural capital to be expended (at whatever rate) until its inevitable exhaustion, and seeing our own presence on earth as inherently destructive, we can design an integrated model in which everything we take from the earth can remain in use, albeit in different form, and the concept of waste no longer exists. Our industrial byproducts and discarded materials thus become nutrients for either the biosphere (as food or fertilizer) or the technosphere (as high-value industrial inputs); we build factories that produce clean water as a byproduct, tires that absorb toxins from the road surface while you drive, bottles that biodegrade into food for plant seeds (indigenous, of course) embedded in their bases. The key is “eco-effectiveness”: “not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world.” Meanwhile, industries reap their own benefits by reducing the costs of treating, shipping and storing waste and efficiently recapturing valuable raw materials that retain their full industrial utility.

As compelling as the vision is, there’s still the small matter of making it real. Instead of being pursued after the fact, the way recycling is, eco-efficiency must be built into the industrial process from the ground up, and survive countless economic and competitive pressures over the course of an imperfect and disruptive adoption process. Every product must be designed to be dismantled, and the means of its production paired with the means of its disintegration. Executives ?\ and the stockholders they answer to ?\ must be persuaded that altruism and profitability can go hand-in-hand. Decades of mutual mistrust among industry, activists and the government must be overcome. It sounds like an impossible task and, indeed, the book stays just a small step in front of the “yeah, right” reflex ?\ but in fact, McDonough and Braungart have put many of their ideas into action with clients including Hermann Miller, for whom they designed an eco-effective factory in Germany, and the Ford Motor Company, whose chairman is a big fan. The book itself is a successful case study, printed on plastic polymer pages that can be unbound, rinsed, and re-used to publish new books long into the future.

The studied avoidance of finger-pointing in “Cradle to Cradle” doesn’t mean it lacks moral clarity. “Should manufacturers of existing products feel guilty about their complicity in this heretofore destructive agenda? Yes. No. It doesn’t matter…. Now that we know, it’s time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.” The only obstacles seem to be failure of imagination and lack of moral courage on the part of our leaders of government and industry. So we’re all set, then.

A review of Cradle to Cradle at Flak Magazine

“The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.” ~Albert Einstein

They start by challenging the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle”, doing more with less in order to minimize damage. Although an improvement, this approach is only postponing our inevitable degradation of the planet’s systems and resources. It perpetuates the one-way “cradle to grave” manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic waste and pollution in the first place. They propose using nature as our model for making things, where nothing is wasted.

Products can be designed from the outset so that after useful lives, they will provide “nourishment” for something new. They can be planned as “biological nutrients” that will easily and safely re-enter the water or soil, or they can be “technical nutrients” that will continually circulate as valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles. Rather than being recycled, products are downcycled into low-grade materials and uses. This design precept requires a commitment to disassemble the product?fs components to be reused in as valuable a form as possible.

Another idea which is discussed is “ecoefficiency”. “It is an outwardly admirable, even noble concept, but it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, merely slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive measures. It presents little more than an illusion of change. Relying on ecoefficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.”

Industry has interpreted this as ?gto be less bad?h and conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Using many examples the authors explain how we can develop positive creative solutions, and become, once again, native to the earth, in harmony with it. At their conclusion, they offer five guiding principles to help designers and business leaders guide the transition to this new way of thinking.

From Eartheasy Book Review

“At some point a manufacturer or designer decides, ‘We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep supporting this system.’ At some point they will decide that they would prefer to leave behind a positive design legacy. But when is that point?” they ask at one point, answering their question in the next sentence,” write McDonough and Braungart.

“We say that point is today, and negligence starts tomorrow.”

They refuse to consider business and consumption as evil, a rarity from those in the environmentalist movement, they believe that environmental unfriendliness is simply a design issue that can be rectified by considering again what we want from our products and manufacturing processes and redesigning them to be both friendly to the planet and profitable.

From a review : Towards a new elegance by Steven Martinovich

This may be the most radical proposal of a book filled with radical but eminently practical proposals. Mr. McDonough and Mr. Braungart conceive of a paradigm shift that removes the guilt from environmentalism. Most environmentalists point out the negative apects of certain practices, such as bleaching paper. They rely on guilt to motivate people to employ less harmful practices such as using recycled paper. However, when this paper can no longer be recycled it will end up in a landfill, where it will leech the chlorine that was used to bleach the original paper.

This form of recycling, which the authors define as “downcycling,” merely postpones the consequences of the problem. “Upcycling,” on the other hand, completely reuses materials in ways that do not degrade their quality. The authors call the upcycling approach “eco-effective,” as opposed to the “eco-efficient” approach of conventional recycling. With more and more corporations considering their products’ complete life cycles, the application of the cradle-to-cradle model could have profound implications not only for the environment but also for investors. Eco-effective companies can potentially lower their raw material costs and generate more sustainable returns.

The key to economic nutrition is keeping biological and technical nutrients separate, so that each can be fully upcycled to remain in the economic food chain.

The authors see at present a world where valuable raw materials are thrown into the “grave” of landfills simply because the designers did not have enough foresight to plan for their reuse. They envision a world where intelligent design results in the perpetual reuse of materials, and where the concept of waste becomes obsolete.

While traditional environmentalism chants a reduction mantra (reduce, reuse, recycle), the cradle-to-cradle theory is rooted in capitalism, which encourages growth. Environmentalists often focus on how products degrade the environment. The authors reconcile growth with environmental preservation by envisioning products that are in harmony with the earth’s cycles of regeneration.

The cradle-to-cradle theory almost conveys a sense of inevitability. Investors with foresight can support the transformation from an economy that presages its own funeral (cradle-to-grave) to an economy that celebrates its perpetual reincarnation (cradle-to-cradle). And these investors can profit financially while encouraging the adaptation of what the authors claim is a truly sustainable form of capitalism.

A review of “Cradle to Cradle” by William Baue at http://www.socialfunds.com/

Keywords : capitalism, economic growth, consumerism, ecosocial crisis, zero waste, industry, commerce, trade, production, design, civilization, ecological economics, cradle to cradle, technical nutrients, biomimicry, planet, profit, externalities, co-intelligence
(use search box to list entries with one of these keywords)