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Cradle to Cradle
Sustainability
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Cradle to Cradle
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"Design is a signal of intention," the authors write. Can we not just reduce, reuse, and recycle, but eliminate the very concept of waste? Ants make up more biomass on Earth than humans do. They're busy little suckers, but their activity doesn't hurt the environment—it nurtures it. Could we be the same way?
The old industrial and product design is linear: creating more, more, more stuff to throw away. But where is "away," the authors ask. They call for a positive design legacy, moving past the old ways that glorify economic activity above all else and treat nature like the enemy.So far (one chapter in) the book certainly feels like a manifesto! The authors make a compelling moral argument and I look forward to what they'll say about the "positive design legacy" they hope we leave.
I was struck by the part in Chapter 4 (I think) where the authors talk about biological nutrients and technical nutrients.The biological nutrients would be part of a biological metabolism, and would nourish the system as they biodegrade.
Technical nutrients would be recovered and reused or upcycled.
Fascinating to think how differently we could be doing things...
This book is a kind of manifesto, and has an appropriately scornful tone when discussing both the traditional, linear-thinking industrial processes that threaten our environment and the inadequate "be less bad" approaches to solving the problem.The authors call for ambitious designs for everything we make and use, for products that not only don't harm the Earth and its ecosystems but actually help the environment by working as part of biological and technical nutrient cycles.
A good framing of the issues we face. Recommended.
"Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.
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