cradle to cradle remaking the way we make

It's a handbook for 21st-century innovation and should be required reading for business hotshots and environmental activists.

Cradle to Cradle is a refreshing change from the intractable environmental conflicts that dominate headlines. They offer several compelling examples of corporations that are not just doing less harm-they're actually doing some good for the environment and their neighborhoods, and making more money in the process. The authors, an architect and a chemist, want to eliminate the concept of waste altogether, while preserving commerce and allowing for human nature. Recycling, for instance, is actually 'downcycling,' creating hybrids of biological and technical 'nutrients' which are then unrecoverable and unusable. Why settle for the least harmful alternative when we could have something that is better-say, edible grocery bags! In Cradle to Cradle, the authors present a manifesto calling for a new industrial revolution, one that would render both traditional manufacturing and traditional environmentalism obsolete. Paper or plastic? Neither, say William McDonough and Michael Braungart. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as 'biological nutrients' that safely re-enter the environment or as 'technical nutrients' that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being 'downcycled' into low-grade uses (as most 'recyclables' now are).Įlaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, William McDonough and Michael Braungart make an exciting and viable case for change. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective hence, 'waste equals food' is the first principle the book sets forth. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, 'cradle to grave' manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic.

'Reduce, reuse, recycle' urge environmentalists in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism

Cradle to cradle remaking the way we make