My notes on 'Cradle to Cradle Re-Making The Way We Make Things' by Michael Braungart and William McDonough:
We live in a consumer economy. To feed that economy resources are extracted, shaped into products, sold and eventually disposed of - either in landfill or an incinerator (Energy Recovery Facility). New resources are then extracted, to be shaped into more products etc etc.
The Earth's resources are valuable and finite. Whatever is naturally here is all we have. Whatever humans make does not go away. There is no 'away' for it to go to. If we carry on contaminating Earth's biosphere and squandering its resources we will live in a world of limits, and production and consumption will inevitably be constrained.
Waste is a huge issue for our world. Products are used and discarded. And the packaging they came in may last far longer than the product it protected. We are running out of space to bury waste in landfill. Incinerators are marketed as the answer. Waste goes in, magically 'disappears', and some energy is produced (which is then profitably sold to the National Grid). Go and take a look at the contents of your bin. None of it was actually designed to be safely burned. What chemicals and toxins do you think might be released if you were to put a match to the lot? Even something as innocent seeming as a newspaper contains dioxins and toxic inks that would be released when burnt. And in an incinerator valuable resources are destroyed that could instead be passed onto our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Very soon this behaviour will seem as bizarre as if we were burning £5 notes to keep warm.
To add to our madness, we also create some wastes so toxic that we need to find a way of marking their containment sites so that our descendants (even thousands, or tens of thousands of years from now) will know not to drill for water there or otherwise bring about harmful exposures and releases.
Of course, there is recycling. But most products are not designed to be recycled. It is not easy to separate out the different components and the resulting material tends to be of a lower quality than the original. It also simply delays the inevitable. Your plastic bottles become your parka... and in five years time the parka goes to landfill just like the bottle would have done. The plastic bottle was not designed to be recycled and turned into clothes. So the fleece you are wearing next to your skin may contain toxins (e.g. antimony).
Page 89 - An olive-oil vendor returns from the marketplace and complains to a friend, "I can't make money selling olive oil! By the time I feed the donkey that carries my oil to market, most of my profit is gone." His friend suggests he feed the donkey a little less. Six weeks later they meet again at the marketplace. The oil seller is in poor shape, with neither money nor donkey. When his friend asks what happened, the vendor replies, "Well, I did as you said. I fed the donkey a little less, and I began to do really well. So I fed him even less, and I did even better. But just at the point where I was becoming really successful, he died!".
Imagine an alien civilization that has solved these problems. They safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species on their world; they grow and harvest their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are a part; they construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries and food-storage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled; they create disinfectants and medicines that are healthy, safe, and biodegradable; they maintain the soil health for their entire planet; and even their most deadly chemical weapons are biodegradable, and when they return to the soil, they supply nutrients. This alien civilization is an ant colony. Although they are much smaller than us they are so numerous that their biomass exceeds ours, and they have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. But their density and productiveness is not a problem for the rest of the world.
In Nature there is no such thing as waste. One organism's 'waste' becomes another's food. Nutrients are endlessly cycled and re-cycled, and the whole system is fueled by solar energy.
The authors propose a 'cradle to cradle' approach (rather than the current 'cradle to grave'). This is one where biological materials are designed to return to and nourish the earth, and technical materials are designed to be retrieved at the end of a product's useful life and remade into new products. It would take into account all parts of the process of producing an item including byproducts of manufacturing and the energy used. With this approach humans could consume as much as they wish without causing harm to the planet.
They propose: buildings that, like trees, produce more energy than they consume and purify their own waste water; factories that produce effluents that are drinking water; products that, when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste but can be tossed onto the ground to decompose and become food for plants and animals and nutrients for soil; or alternately, that can return to industrial cycles to supply high-quality raw materials for new products; billions, even trillions of dollars' worth of materials accrued for human and natural purposes each year; transportation that improves the quality of life while delivering goods and services; a world of abundance, not one of limits, pollution and waste.
Encouragingly they also cite some examples of these principles in action.
The carpet manufacturer Desso; the waste management company Van Gansewinkel; the office furniture company orangebox; Philips; Aveda; Herman Miller; Chicago City Hall; Designtex; Ford River Rouge Plant.
Further Reading:
http://www.rsm.nl/research/departments/technology-and-operations-management/research/cradle-to-cradle-for-innovation-and-quality/c2c-teaching-cases/
http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/circular-economy
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