Eartheasy Book Review:

Cradle to Cradle
Remaking the Way We Make Things

by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

“The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation”.

This quote by Albert Einstein and the subtitle “Remaking the way we make things” are hints that the reader is dared to think differently about the earth’s resources. The authors of this visionary book are proposing a new industrial revolution which has the power to transform both industry and environmentalism. William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a chemist, encourage us to develop a new paradigm about nature and commerce.

They start by challenging the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle”, doing more with less in order to minimize damage. Although an improvement, this approach is only postponing our inevitable degradation of the planet’s systems and resources. It perpetuates the one-way “cradle to grave” manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic waste and pollution in the first place. They propose using nature as our model for making things, where nothing is wasted.

Products can be designed from the outset so that after useful lives, they will provide “nourishment” for something new. They can be planned as “biological nutrients” that will easily and safely re-enter the water or soil, or they can be “technical nutrients” that will continually circulate as valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles. Rather than being recycled, products are downcycled into low-grade materials and uses. This design precept requires a commitment to disassemble the product’s components to be reused in as valuable a form as possible.

Another idea which is discussed is “ecoefficiency”. “It is an outwardly admirable, even noble concept, but it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, merely slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive measures. It presents little more than an illusion of change. Relying on ecoefficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.”

Industry has interpreted this as “to be less bad” and conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Using many examples the authors explain how we can develop positive creative solutions, and become, once again, native to the earth, in harmony with it. At their conclusion, they offer five guiding principles to help designers and business leaders guide the transition to this new way of thinking.

This reviewer appreciated McDonough’s and Braungart’s descriptions of their successful sustainable projects. The book was a satisfying balance of history, philosophy, theory and practical application. As many environmental books focus on the negative, it is refreshing to hear a positive, optimistic message.

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