Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
by William McDonough & Michael Braungart
North Point Press

Environmentalism is depressing. Who likes to be reminded that our cherished way of life is fundamentally unsustainable, or to contemplate the Spartan lifestyles offered as a remedy (and a penance) by sandal-wearing petition-passers? Still, as good citizens of the world, we try to do our part. We recycle when it's convenient, cut up plastic six-pack rings when we remember and let old batteries roll around in the back of desk drawers forever in case they're the kind you're not supposed to throw in the trash.

Ready for a new approach?

"Cradle to Cradle" departs radically from traditional thinking about sustainable living, first dispatching such sacred cows as recycling, government regulation and the Rio Earth Summit, then presenting a bold design agenda for a world where material prosperity and a healthy environment aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. The book includes plenty of information of the rather-not-know variety — the mutagenic particles released by your favorite armchair, the deadly gases exhaled by your computer — but the authors, an architect and a chemist by trade, temper the reader's paranoia with their confidence that a solution is in sight.

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.

Activists see industry as inherently evil and destructive, while industry sees environmentalism as oblivious to the economic and social costs of its demands; but one thing they have in common is the belief that any real change will come at the price of a reduced standard of living. It comes as something of a relief, then, to learn that this viewpoint may simply be an atavistic legacy of our primitive origins. "In very early societies, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice were typical reactions to complex systems, like nature, over which people felt they had little control.... In some cultures, even today, one must sacrifice something of value in order to regain the blessing of the gods (or god) and reestablish stability and harmony." How welcome, likewise, is the news that saving the planet can bring economic benefits as well.

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.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)