Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things Paperback – April 22, 2002

A new trend is beginning to emerge and its presence increasingly felt in our everyday lives. Let me offer an example: As you take a stroll through your neighborhood you are likely to see not just one container, but two lining the curbs of the street. To many, their existence resembles progress and an increased responsibility in the way we interact with our environment. In fact, to own and use a recycling bin (yes, you likely already guessed it) in some ways has progressed to an object of pride or a display of consumer responsibility. However, it’s early and you take little notice of them as they have become quite commonplace in your neighborhood. You continue your walk and pass a couple wearing matching slip-on shoes, which you recognize from an advertisement as being made of recycled rubber and various other recycled materials. In addition, they are each carrying a cotton grocery bag which they intentionally bring and reuse every time they make such a trip to the store. You head back down your street (feeling slightly guilty after the couple passed you and wondering if you shouldn’t also be using such a bag) and arrive back at your residence. You reach down and pick up the newspaper (made of recycled paper) just as your neighbor pulls into their driveway, windows down and music playing. You recognize the soothing voice of Jack Johnson and strain your ears to listen more closely:If you're going to the market to buy some juice. You've got to bring your own bags and you learn to reduce your waste...And if your brother or your sister's got some cool clothes...You could try them on before you buy some more of those...Reuse, we've got to learn to reuse… And if the first two R's don't work out..and if you've got to make some trash...Don't throw it out...Recycle, we've got to learn to recycle…I think I’ve made my point. The message is everywhere. And as Johnson’s song laid out for us above, the message is clear: Reduce, reuse, recycle. However, as widespread and as this message is becoming one must stop and ask: is it effective? William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things that such a design goal is ineffective. Efficient? Yes. Effective? Not quite. They propose that such efforts, which they categorize as “eco-efficient” design, are only a “less bad” version of a poor design methodology that emerged from the industrial revolution. These efforts do not change the way products are designed, rather they seek to mitigate the effects of poor design. As result, they seek a negative goal of zero impact on the environment. The problems associated with this approach are numerous. First, it creates a dichotomy between the environment and industry, with gains to one necessitating a loss to the other (also known as zero sum, see the trend). This leads to conflict and opposing agendas between the two and does very little to reveal how the two may actually be of benefit to one another. Second, as mentioned, it only makes a bad thing, less bad. To reduce something bad or harmful does not negate its impact, but only delays it. As such, these efforts are by definition unsustainable. Third, at best it has a goal of seeking not to degrade the environment and certainly does not consider the possibility that good design may actually improve the environment. So what is the main problem with the design form that emerged from the industrial revolution? Put simply, it was designed to become waste. Or put another way, it was designed with waste in mind. The authors label such design, cradle-to-grave design, as it is purposed from inception to become waste. They suggest that to solve this design dilemma we must rethink our idea of waste, or rather not think of it as a possibility at all. If design is reborn without waste in mind then we will have new products and new systems that bring life and wasteful abundance to its surroundings. If we sow design with new life in mind, our industries and our environment will reap the benefits of this change in design methodology. The author’s point out that nature’s idea of waste or excess actually enriches its surroundings. What if we design products from inception that sought to do the same? What if we learned from nature’s example and designed our systems cradle-to-cradle?

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.