Cradle to Cradle: Rethinking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart.

2/5 rating. 186 pages.

Book #23 of 2023. Read July 4, 2023.

This book introduces the paradigm shift in design towards zero waste: not in the idea of no byproduct, but a circular system where there is truly no waste because the outputs are used as additional inputs. This is an incredible idea and must be our future path!!!

This book was a complete letdown as I’ve been looking forward to reading it for a long time but it wasn’t very good. The two authors work in designing systems globally that are more circular, with the end-of-life of the product truly in mind.

“In this scenario, customers (a more apt term for the users of these products) would effectively purchase the service of such a product for a defined user period – say, ten thousand hours of television viewing, rather than the television itself….When they finish with the product, or are simply ready to upgrade to a newer version, the manufacturer replaces it, taking the old model back, breaking it down, and using its complex materials as food for new products.”

Unfortunately, the book was just very dry and was entirely not engaging. Again, as THE PERFECT audience for a book like this, I found myself bored and turned off by some of the statements about the usefulness of some of the current environmentalist attempts at fixing our current system.

Quotes:

“Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”

“What is the right thing for this place?”

“In planetary terms, we’re all downstream.”

“[W]e conceived the idea for a building and its site modeled on the way a tree works. We imagined ways that it could purify the air, create shade and habitat, enrich soil, and change with the seasons, eventually accruing more energy than it needs to operate. Features include solar panels on the roof; a grove of trees on the building’s north side for wind protection and diversity; an interior designed to change and adapt to people’s aesthetic and functional preferences with raised floors and leased carpeting; a pond that stores water for irrigation; a living machine inside and beside the building that uses a pond full of specially selected organisms and plants to clean the effluent; classrooms and large public rooms that face west and south to take advantage of solar gain; special windowpanes that control the amount of UV light entering the building; a restored forest on the east side of the building; and an approach to landscaping and grounds maintenance that obviates the need for pesticides or irrigation.”

“Foremost among them was ‘Eliminate the concept of waste’ – not reduce, minimize, or avoid waste, as environmentalists were then propounding, but eliminate the very concept, by design.”

“Also, what most people see in their garbage cans is just the tip of a material iceberg; the product itself contains on average only 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.”

“Rather than being designed around a natural and cultural landscape, most modern urban areas simply grow, as has often been said, like a cancer, spreading more and more of themselves, eradicating the living environment in the process, blanketing the natural landscape with layers of asphalt and concrete.”

“Most packaging (which makes up about 50 percent of the volume of the municipal solid waste stream) can be designed as biological nutrients, what we call products of consumption.”

#circulardesign #cradletocradle

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