Cradle to Cradle

Although it took me way too long, I finally finished the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.  William McDonough does a bit of an overview of some of the concepts of this book at TED, which can be found here.  I feel a little disappointed that I did not discover this book until recently (it was written in 2002), but I can’t do anything about it…

 

Here’s the point I walked away with:

 

Sustainability is not about giving things up.

Too much of the “green” effort we see focuses on the consumer.  Use less, recycle more.  This is all well and good, but if being sustainable is perceived as losing one’s quality of life, it is going to have a tough time catching on.  William McDonough is a well respected sustainable architect (the first time I ran across his name was when he was Dean of the A School (School of Architecture) at UVA), and Michael Braungart is a chemical engineer.  As designers, they both say the responsibility of a sustainable culture rests on the designers of products, and not those who consume them.  Although there are many things consumers should do, a much greater impact can be had if designers built products with their entire life cycle use in mind, for example cars which are designed to be taken apart and broken down into useable raw materials state.  The go into a top-level separation of two different recyclable materials – technical “nutrients” (metals and other materials which can be recycled and reused) and biological nutrients (materials which can be returned to the environment safely to become again part of the biological process).

 

There is much more to the book and I won’t summarize all of its points.  I did walk away with another valuable point: you can only do as Good as the best information you have available.  There is an endless level of research that one can do when researching materials to use.  However, if you want to get anything done, there has to be a stopping point.   There is, at some point, a time when either the information stops, or there is so much you cannot get anything done.  As a designer, I deal with that enough.  But we will always improve our processes, and learn to do better on the next one.  This book raises the bar on what sustainability is…  I would like to see these concepts become a reality while I’m still alive.