Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I heard one of the authors, William McDonough speak before. He wasn't alarmist the way many "environmentalists" are these days, and yet what he had to say was a more fundamental change than anything else I've heard. He pushes the statement so far as to make the book out of plastic.

I highly recommmend this book.

Is the title of my review hyperbole? I would submit that it is not. What this book represents is, in my opinion, the first clear articulation of the fundamental reason why humankind has reached an environmental crisis point where we either adapt, change, and flourish; or are swept clean (or at best decimated and reduced to barbarism) from this world as a failed species.

However, this book is not about deprivation; its not about returning to 'Walden Pond' and renouncing growth, innovation, technology, and an advanced (and advancing) civilization. William McDonough and Michael Braungart's articulated vision is that through elegant, effective, integral, and enlightened design, we can fundamentally change the underlying paradigm via which the material objects of civilization are created; that through such a paradigm shift we can abolish *waste* by designing all systems whereby 'waste equals food' in all systems of civilization.

To date, mankind has operated within a design paradigm whereby designers of systems, products, and materials, assumed that we could "throw something AWAY"; and were the forces of time and nature, at those places which they consider to be *AWAY* enough, would prove capable of rendering the undesirable byproducts of our creation and consumption back into a 'natural', safe, and again desirable, state. Such design assumptions may have been viable until the advent of the industrial age, but are no longer valid. Since we discovered how to burn coal, forge steel, concentrate heavy metals, and synthesize plastics, we have been inexorably moving towards this point in time and this crisis.

This book drives home the point that there is no longer any viable *AWAY* towards which mankind might, in place of adequate design, throw away the ever increasing quantities of undesirable byproducts of the 'metabolism' of our civilization. Moreover, the authors point out that these 'metabolites' of civilization are such that there must be a differentiation, and separation, between a 'natural cycle of reuse' (which consists of materials and objects that can be naturally broken down into safe components through time, sunlight, oxidation, etc.) and a 'technical cycle of reuse' (which includes materials and objects which cannot, through being concentrated and/or synthesized by mankind, be safely broken down by natural processes and must therefore be technically reprocessed). It is this very mixing of component cycles that has yielded so much disease and suffering in the world; the dioxins, the mercury levels, the myriad mutagens and toxins now pervading our environment.

This book is not a work of pessimism and "we are doomed" extremism; it is a book filled with an honest faith in Mankind's ability blaze a new path towards the reconciliation, through design excellence, of environmental stewardship and a high technical, and economically vibrant, civilization. However, it is not by any means, a pollyanna of unfounded optimism and the authors pull no punches regarding what's broken, the seriousness of the problems we face, and a path towards recovery.

In closing, this book is tremendously important because it represents a manifesto for a movement to revolutionize design and inspire designers and empower entrepreneurs who see opportunity in the advent of this design paradigm shift. I must say, that it is one of the most encouraging books I have read in recent memory and it has galvanized me into becoming an activist and evangelist of the Cradle-to-Cradle Movement. I hope, and pray, that this book, and the movement that it has spawned, continues to take hold, gains critical mass, and acts to help pull us from the brink of the tragic disaster that we face should we continue as we have to date.

This book gaves you a complete different way to see things. I really like it, anjoy reading and it's make me think in a complete new way.
If you think recicling its the best you can do it, then read this great book and you will see the true.

McDonough's and Braungart's point is most succinctly summarized in one of their chapter titles: "Why Being `Less Bad' Is No Good." Recycling, they say, just postpones the inevitable resource depletion. Plus, recycling normally only takes you one step through the cycle, or less: recycled paper is substantially less strong than new paper, so it needs to be fortified with chemical additives. They give countless examples of processes that seem good but are in fact just less evil. We're making ourselves less bad by recycling, but we're not actually solving the larger ecological problem.

The big way to solve it, they say, is for products to assume from the start that they will be thrown away, and embrace that fact. Paper doesn't recycle well because it wasn't designed to be recycled; hence it becomes worse with every generation. So Cradle to Cradle is printed on non-paper; it's recycled plastic. Subject it to a simple chemical process, or to extremely high heat, and the ink detaches to form completely reusable pages. Products need to be infinitely reusable with limited additional processing. People need to be thinking about their products in perfectly closed ecological loops.

The authors envision a day when products will be gleefully thrown on the side of the road as soon-to-be-decomposed litter. Why not build your plastic containers with a little seed inside, so that when they're thrown overboard they add something to the environment rather than taking away from it? This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but one of this book's great joys -- which keeps it from flying off into Liberal Fairy-Land -- is that the authors are architects and industrial designers who've spent 20 years designing eco-friendly products and buildings. They impressively helped re-architect the River Rouge factory for the 21st century. Their hopes are quite a bit grander, though: a day when cars themselves will be perfectly recyclable, when their parts can be disassembled, melted down and built into a new, equally high quality car with minimal labor.

The authors' natural next step is to develop an environmental certification process by which products would be labeled "cradle to cradle" if they're designed to be environmentally beneficial even when thrown away. This, it seems, is exactly what they've done. (Those of my friends who've bought environmentally friendly carpeting because they're concerned about outgassing might look, for instance, at cradle-to-cradle carpet fiber.)

The larger message is that you can't just look at a product in isolation, or even at a process like recycling in isolation. Look at whole ecosystems, instead. Celebrate organic diversity. Don't see the world like a corporation, growing one kind of vegetable because it's cheaper and believing that your responsibility ends at the factory door.

But again, this would be too pie-in-the-sky for the authors' purposes, not only because they want to make money, but because they need to enlist corporate support if they're going to get anywhere with their hopes for social improvement. So a good chunk of the book is given over to showing that corporations actually save money in the not-very-long run if they design cradle-to-cradle products. Not least among the savings is avoiding regulation: if your product is only "less bad," in that it contains (for instance) less mercury, you'll still have to submit to a government review to make sure you're being good enough. But if your product is designed from the ground up to help the environment -- or even to be edible -- you skirt around these environmental problems by design. Just the cost of avoiding regulation, they say, often pays for the re-engineering.

This book makes you re-think ideas of environmentalism and how we can really make a difference without making life less pleasant. It isn't all about endless recycling, stopping buying new things or walking around in hemp clothing. This book challenges us to think up new ways of designing everything and truly making no bad impact on the earth.