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Title: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough, Michael Braungart ISBN: 0-86547-587-3 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 22 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (26 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Change your way of thinking about progress
Comment: "Cradle to Crade" is a fabulous book. Regardless of whether you agree with the authors' views, you will find excellent arguments, good research, and clear explanations from philosophical, historical, scientific, and business perspectives.
The upshot of the book is that humanity's whole philosophy of designing technology is destructive to the planet. What we need to do is realize that since the Earth is a closed system, we need to use industrial processes that both avoid toxifying the environment and produce finished products whose raw materials can be endlessly reused. We're not talking convential recycling programs, where various kinds of plastic get melted together to produce a big mass of low-quality material. The authors provide several examples of products that meet their conditions. They're well-equipped to do so, since for a decade they've run a design firm that helps companies do exactly what they preach.
There's more to this book than just a "2nd industrial revolution". When the authors apply the same basic ideas to urban planning, economic "efficiency", or health issues, it really gives us some great points to ponder. Hopefully some of us will even be inspired to action. It's really a very important book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Visionary Environmentalism
Comment: 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.
The design of the book is making a point also made in the text of the book: the current state of recycling generally turns higher quality products into lower quality ones useful only for purposes other than the original product, and then eventually discards them. This is not recycling; it's slow motion waste.
"Cradle to Cradle," the object, is intended to be easily and completely recyclable into a new book of the same quality.
"Cradle to cradle," the phrase, is contrasted to "cradle to grave."
"Cradle to Cradle," the text, argues in favor of making all human productions either recyclable in the way this book is or completely biodegradable so that they can be used as fertilizer.
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.
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.
This book is superb and should be read by those familiar with the issues of environmental design and those completely new to the topic. It draws on themes common in a long list of books ranging from "Ishmael," by Daniel Quinn to "Natural Capitalism," by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. But McDonough and Braungart make no acknowledgements of any such influences and present themselves (just as these other authors have) as the vanguard of a change as radical as the industrial revolution.
Their idea is incredibly important and well stated, but it's not the clear break from current environmental (or for that matter industrial or "Third Way") thinking that they maintain - and for students of evolution why should it need to be, what's wrong with evolving our thinking a helpful bit further, as they have done? 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.
Three comments. First, 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. It is intended to free the typical reader of guilt. I think it should do something else as well, namely urge us to political action, to demanding of our democratically elected representatives that the earth-saving innovations described in the book be taken advantage of. All the descriptions in this book of common household objects, such as sofas, "off-gasing" toxic particles makes me want to take action to change things or at least buy a mask, not go shopping.
Second, the examples of new materials and building and product designs described in the book all build on the environmental thinking that McD and B so loudly reject. Reducing pollution to zero is not a "new paradigm" from reducing pollution to a teeny bit - it's just better.
Third, 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.
There is also a disturbing thread of anti-government corporatism in the book. Ford and Nike and other corporations for which the authors have worked are described as heroes for their positive efforts, while their destructive practices are passed over. The authors repeat a distinction (citing Jane Jacobs' "Systems of Survival") between Guardians and Commerce, i.e. paternalistic government and noble corporate heroes:
"Commerce is quick, highly creative, inventive, constantly seeking short- and long-term advantage, and inherently honest: you can't do business with people if they aren't trustworthy."
Is this a joke? Do these guys believe press releases they read from, say, Enron? (Apparently so, because later in the book they write: "...the summer of 2001, when unusually high energy demand in California led to rolling blackouts, skyrocketing prices, even accusations of profiteering...." Accusations! High demand or restrained supply? What rock have these intelligent authors been naturally cooling themselves under? Well, at least they recognize the concept of profiteering, even though it fits poorly with the inherent honesty of commerce.)
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).
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting ideas
Comment: This book is a sometimes interesting, often meandering treatise on design. The authors, and American architect and a German chemist, have a very sincere desire to realign the world of design of objects and buildings so that they contribute to the betterment of the environment rather than destroy it. The title of the book "Cradle to Cradle" encapsulates their goal of designing objects that when they are no longer needed, naturally become useful inputs for the production of other objects rather than getting sent to the grave (or buried in a landfill). For example, they would like to see the creation of food packaging that could be thrown on the ground when the contents are consumed and would become fertilizer rather than non-biodegradable litter. (By this measure, the women concessionaires selling steamed rice treats in Indonesian trains are masters of design. The rice is both steamed and packaged in banana leafs, which are simply thrown out the train windows once the rice is consumed. But this practice also creates enormous problems- -since Indonesians have been accustomed to using such environmentally beneficial packaging for generations, they assume that "modern" packaging can be discarded in the same manner, much to the detriment of the Indonesian countryside. If you are living in a world of mixed packaging, some of which can be thrown out the window, and some of which must be discarded by other means, it's hard to keep straight which stuff goes where. That's a vital cultural issue that the authors don't explore here.)
McDounough and Braungart list the goals for their design program. They challenge inventors and industry leaders to design factories that "produce more energy than they consume, and purify their own waste water," and products that "can be tossed on the ground to decompose" or become "high-quality raw materials for new products" rather than simply "down-cycled". At the outset, these goals can sound a bit far-fetched. After, all, a factory that produces more energy than it consumes would seem to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what the authors really mean here is not that the factory would miraculously produce something from nothing, but that the design of the factory would include such things as solar collectors on the roof and devices to capture heat that could then send energy back out to the power grid, perhaps even in excess of electrical energy coming in. They illustrate their lofty dreams with concrete designs that they have helped develop and implement, such as a cosmetics plant in Germany whose wastewater is actually cleaner than the water coming in to the plant, thanks to the new chemical formulations they recommended. What's more, they point out that such design efforts can be even be good for business, since in this particular example, the company was able to cut costs on hazardous materials handling and storage enough to more than offset slightly increased production costs with the new formulas. Such design efforts are fabulous examples of the potential benefits of thinking "out of the box".
The book contains quite a few additional examples of brilliant design ideas that can save resources as well as money. The book is also filled with surprising tidbits that haven't become general knowledge yet, like the potential hazards of wearing fabric made of recycled plastic bottles, and the fact that PET bottles were found to leach antimony when used as soap containers. The authors point out that the decision to use either recycled paper or virgin paper is not as clear cut as it seems- -while the production of virgin paper necessitates the cutting down of trees, recycling paper requires enormous amounts of bleaching, which produces PCBs. To demonstrate an alternative, the book itself is printed on a paper-free composite of plastics, which could be easily recycled into more book-grade plastics. The informative details and design goals of the book are quite interesting. However, the text often meanders around and through topics that are at best tangential or described better in other volumes. At times, some details or issues are also rehashed repetitively. In these places, it would have been better to focus on explicating McDonough and Braungart's own design program more fully. They've got some neat ideas that are well worth exploring, and it would have been great to be able to read even more about them and less about the general problems of environmental destruction that are described better in other books.
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Title: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins ISBN: 0316353000 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 12 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Biomimicry : Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus ISBN: 0060533226 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Sustainable Architecture White Papers by Earth Pledge ISBN: 0967509912 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: February, 2001 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken ISBN: 0887307043 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: August, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model by Ray Anderson ISBN: 0964595354 Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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