Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

This is such a wonderful, enlightening, and self-reflective book! It was reccomended to me by a good friend, and boy was he dead on with this one. "Cradle-to-Cradle" thoroughly outlines the essential flaws within the current industrial process in which we make and consume everyday products, and the resulting affect of what a faulty industry structure and overconsumption has on the environment and sunsequently the problem with global warming.

With an immense depth of coverage, yet well-written and easy to digest, I was able to gain a full understanding of WHY our current industrial cycle is outdated, how it got to be in the first place, and how we may be able to take the steps torward the next industrial revolution with the implementation of a more environmental economic approach, in contrast to an outdated, bottom-line-only strategy. Phenominal read, easy to stay with, and borderline addicting. Has encouraged me to reflect upon my own personal consumption and how I can go about pursuing products or services that are more sustainable in their production and reproduction.

The concept behind this book is very important. It is an overview of a thoroughgoing design process that has, at its root, a deep commitment to biomimcry and essentialism in the creation of new things. To boot is a thoughtful (and I think accurate) criticism of the current state of the environmental movement.

The writers believe that if we're to succeed in harmonizing our existence with the planet's biosphere on which we depend, we're going to have to rethink how we make things profoundly, and sustainability alone is not going to cut it.

That said, the book is preachy, self indulgent in a way that academicians are great at doing so that it seems politically correct -- at one point I felt like the entire book was nothing more than an advertisement for the authors' design firm. Don't let that throw you off. It's an important book waiting for a new generation to pick it up and turn it into something with real grit, leveraging unorthodox creativity and a love for our pale blue dot in the universe for its own sake; to wrest it away from the marketing-communications-speak of a corporation. Alas, time is not on our side.

GET EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO READ THIS BOOK.

Should be required reading for every elementary school, then again in high school, and again at university.

The desire for a better world has always been there. This is the leadership we need: How to go about it, and why, but ultimately a decision left up to you.

Some of the less than 5 star reviews are so nit-picky that they are laughable. This is the definitive green book of solutions around. It actually gives all of us, and most especially industry, a productive way out of our ignorant, polluting, plutocratic, plundering, of natural resources. This book was written in 2002 and has slowly become the industry standard for how to design product, buildings, and infrastructure responsibly. If we actually listen to Braungart, and McDonough our planet and us will actually begin to turn recover and our children will have a future.Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

I SINCERELY regret to say I couldn't have disliked this book more. The chapter on food -which discussed fabric and carpets more than calories- was particularly disappointing. If a sustainability expert cannot or will not admit that a meat based diet is the single most ecologically devastating habit of US citizens, how can one take them seriously? Eliminating animal proteins from one's diet is more ecologically beneficial to the planet than driving a hybrid or any other combination of factors but this book pandered to comfort minded consumers who wish to believe they can spend their way into sustainability by buying reusable grocery bags or "organic" products. Not that it doesn't help but true sustainability is about conserving, not spending. Sustainability requires painful changes; it's not something you can push off to the government to regulate or boycott businesses to comply; it starts with YOU. I doubt this book would have been as popular had it dared discomfit the average person by speaking the truth.

Lastly, I found the whole discussion of the book material selection to be ridiculous. Why would the authors believe their book is so wonderful that it should have the durability to out last all life forms? After we're gone, you'll find it in landfills next to the pampers. Worse though is the energy load. Aside from the other egregious fallacious presumptions about the text's ecological burden, it weighs three times what a normal book does. I am aghast at how the authors managed to justify the expenditure of the greater requirement of fossil fuels to pack and ship this book around.

I must admit the book changed me, raising the bar of my expectations. Henceforth if someone starts waxing eloquent about their commitments to sustainability, my first question is going to be, "are you a vegetarian"? Anything they say will be filtered through that sieve.