Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

by William McDonough

Allergies, asthma, and “sick building syndrome” are on the rise. Yet legislation establishing mandatory standards for indoor air quality is practically nonexistent.

Everyone’s body is subjected to stress, from both internal and external sources. These stresses may take the form of cancer cells that are naturally produced by the body—by some accounts, as many as twelve cells a day—exposure to heavy metals and other pathogens, and so on. The immune system is capable of handling a certain amount of stress. Simplistically speaking, you could picture those stressors as balls your immune system is juggling. Ordinarily, the juggler is skillful enough to keep those balls in the air. That is, the immune system catches and destroys those ten or twelve cells. But the more balls in the air—the more the body is besieged by all kinds of environmental toxins, for example—the greater the probability that it will drop the ball, that a replicating cell will make a mistake. It would be very hard to say which molecule or factor was the one that pushed a person’s system over the edge. But why not remove negative stressors, especially since people don’t want or need them? Some industrial chemicals produce a second effect, more insidious than causing stress: they weaken the immune system. This is like tying one of the juggler’s hands behind his back, which makes it much harder for him to catch the cancer cells before they cause problems.

Of the approximately eighty thousand defined chemical substances and technical mixes that are produced and used by industries today (each of which has five or more by-products), only about three thousand so far have been studied for their effects on living systems.

Today’s industrial infrastructure is designed to chase economic growth. It does so at the expense of other vital concerns, particularly human and ecological health,

Yet just as industrialists, engineers, designers, and developers of the past did not intend to bring about such devastating effects, those who perpetuate these paradigms today surely do not intend to damage the world. The waste, pollution, crude products, and other negative effects that we have described are not the result of corporations doing something morally wrong. They are the consequence of outdated and unintelligent design.

intergenerational remote tyranny—our tyranny over future generations through the effects of our actions today.

At some point a manufacturer or designer decides, “We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep supporting and maintaining this system.” At some point they will decide that they would prefer to leave behind a positive design legacy. But when is that point?

We say that point is today, and negligence starts tomorrow. Once you understand the destruction taking place, unless you do something to change it, even if you never intended to cause such destr...

You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and imple...

The drive to make industry less destructive goes back to the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, when factories were so destructive and polluting that they had to be controlled in order to prevent immediate sickness and death. Since then the typical response to industrial destruction has been to find a less bad approach. This approach has its own vocabulary, with which most of us are familiar: reduce, avoid, minimize, sustain, limit, halt. These terms have long been central to environmental agendas, and they have become central to most of the environmental agendas taken up by industry today.

But it wasn’t until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that this romantic strain of wilderness appreciation merged with a scientific basis for concern. Up until that point, environmentalism meant protesting the obvious damage—deforestation, mining destruction, factory pollution, and other visible changes—and seeking to conserve especially appreciated landscapes,

she imagined a landscape in which no birds sang, and moved on to explain that human-made chemicals—particularly pesticides such as DDT—were devastating the natural world.

Declining wilderness and diminishing resources merged with pollution and toxic waste as the major realms of concern.

In 1984 Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, followed up the first book with another, The Population Explosion.

“Halt human population growth as quickly and humanely as possible,” and “Convert the economic system from one of growthism to one of sustainability, lowering percapita consumption.”

a follow-up, Beyond the Limits, concluded with more warnings: “Minimize the use of nonrenewable resources.” “Prevent the erosion of renewable resources.” “Use all resources with maximum efficiency.” “Slow and eventually stop exponential growth of population and physical capital.”

Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje’s 1998 Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are. Consumers must take the lead in reducing negative environmental impact, the authors argue: “The simple truth is that all of our major environmental concerns are either caused by, or contribute to, the ever-increasing consumption of goods and services.” This devouring impulse in Western culture is comparable, they maintain, to a drug or alcohol addiction: “Recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a rather large collective hangover . . . overconsumption.” Or again, “The best way to reduce any environmental impact is not to recycle more, but to produce and dispose of less.”

Eco-efficiency would transform human industry from a system that takes, makes, and wastes into one that integrates economic, environmental, and ethical concerns.

Naturally, reducing resource consumption, energy use, emissions, and wastes has a beneficial effect on the environment as well—and on public morale.

The Four R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—and Regulate

Another waste reduction strategy is incineration, which is often perceived as healthier than landfilling and is praised by energy efficiency proponents as “waste to energy.” But waste in incinerators burns only because valuable materials, like paper and plastic, are flammable. Since these materials were never designed to be safely burned, they can release dioxins and other toxins when incinerated.

Finding markets to reuse wastes can also make industries and customers feel that something good is being done for the environment, because piles of waste appear to go “away.” But in many cases these wastes—and any toxins and contaminants they contain—are simply being transferred to another place.

sludge

Unless materials are specifically designed to ultimately become safe food for nature, composting can present problems as well.

What about recycling? As we have noted, most recycling is actually downcycling; it reduces the quality of a material over time. When plastics other than those found in soda and water bottles are recycled, they are mixed with different plastics to produce a hybrid of lower quality, which is then molded into something amorphous and cheap, such as a park bench or a speed bump.

Metals are often downcycled. For example, the high-quality steel used in automobiles—high-carbon, high-tensile steel—is “recycled” by melting it down with other car parts, including copper from the cables in the car, and the paint and plastic coatings. These materials lower the recycled steel’s quality. More high-quality steel may be added to make the hybrid strong enough for its next use, but it will not have the material properties to make new cars again. Meanwhile the rare metals, such as copper, manganese, and chromium, and the paints, plastics, and other components that had value for industry in an unmixed, high-quality state are lost. Currently, there is no technology to separate the polymer and paint coatings from automotive metal before it is processed; therefore, even if a car were designed for disassembly, it is not technically feasible to “close the loop” for its high-quality steel.

Downcycling can actually increase contamination of the biosphere. The paints and plastics that are melted into recycled steel, for example, contain harmful chemicals.

when some plastics are melted and combined, the polymers in the plastic—the chains that make it strong and flexible—shorten. Since the material properties of this recycled plastic are altered (its elasticity, clarity, and tensile strength are diminished), chemical or mineral additives may be added to attain the desired performance quality. As a result, downcycled plastic may have more additives than “virgin” plastic.

Because it was not designed with recycling in mind, paper requires extensive bleaching and other chemical processes to make it blank again for reuse.

the agenda to recycle has superseded other design considerations. Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better—and perhaps even worse—than doing nothing.

Downcycling has one more disadvantage. It can be more expensive for businesses, partly because it tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they were originally designed for,

an ecological agenda becomes a burden for industry instead of a rewarding option.

Money, the tool of commerce, will corrupt the guardian. Regulation, the tool of the guardian, will slow down commerce. An example: a manufacturer might spend more money to provide an improved product under regulations, but its commercial customers, who want products quickly and cheaply, may be unwilling to absorb the extra costs. They may then find what they need elsewhere, perhaps offshore, where regulations are less stringent. In an unfortunate turnaround, the unregulated and potentially dangerous product is given a competitive edge.

Or regulators may try to dilute or distill emissions to a more acceptable level, requiring businesses to increase ventilation or to pump more fresh air into a building because of poor indoor air quality due to off-gassing materials or processes. But this “solution” to pollution—dilution—is an outdated and ineffective response that does not examine the design that caused the pollution in the first place. The essential flaw remains: badly designed materials and systems that are unsuitable for indoor use.

Since regulations often require one-size-fits-all end-of-pipe solutions rather than a deeper design response, they do not directly encourage creative problem-solving. And regulation can pit environmentalists and industries against each other. Because regulations seem like a chastisement, industrialists find them annoying and burdensome. Since environmental goals are typically forced upon business by the guardian—or are simply perceived as an added dimension outside crucial operating methods and goals—industrialists see environmental initiatives as inherently uneconomic.

But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an “acceptable” rate. But as we shall see, good design can require no regulation at all.

Relying on ecoefficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.

eco-efficiency only works to make the old, destructive system a bit less so. In some cases, it can be more pernicious, because its workings are more subtle and long-term. An ecosystem might actually have more of a chance to become healthy and whole again after a quick collapse that leaves some niches intact than with a slow, deliberate, and efficient destruction of the whole.

Efficient destruction is harder to detect and thus harder to stop.

as long as modern industry is so destructive, attempting only to make it less bad is a fatally limited goal.

conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western culture.

What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

Let’s imagine a book that is not a tree. It is not even paper. Instead, it is made of plastics developed around a completely different paradigm for materials, polymers that are infinitely recyclable at the same level of quality—that have been designed with their future life foremost in mind, rather than as an awkward afterthought. This “paper” doesn’t require cutting down trees or leaching chlorine into waterways. The inks are nontoxic and can be washed off the polymer with a simple and safe chemical process or an extremely hot water bath, from either of which they can be recovered and reused. The cover is made from a heavier grade of the same polymer as the rest of the book, and the glues are made of compatible ingredients, so that once the materials are no longer needed in their present form, the entire book can be reclaimed by the publishing industry in a simple one-step recycling process.

it could be recycled, and more to the point, it has the potential to be upcycled: dissolved and remade as polymer of high quality and usefulness.

Once we set about designing with such missions in mind—the short-term usefulness, convenience, and aesthetic pleasure of the product together with the ongoing life of its materials—the process of innovation begins in earnest. We leave aside the old model of product-and-waste, and its dour offspring, “efficiency,” and embrace the challenge of being not efficient but effective with respect to a rich mix of considerations and desires.

We know what an eco-efficient building looks like. It is a big energy saver. It minimizes air infiltration by sealing places that might leak. (The windows do not open.) It lowers solar income with dark-tinted glass, diminishing the cooling load on the building’s air-conditioning system and thereby cutting the amount of fossil-fuel energy used. The power plant in turn releases a smaller amount of pollutants into the environment, and whoever foots the electric bill spends less money. The local utility honors the building as the most energy-saving in its area and holds it up as a model for environmentally conscious design. If all buildings were designed and built this way, it proclaims, businesses could do right by the environment and save money at the same time.

Here’s how we imagine the cherry tree would do it: during the daytime, light pours in. Views of the outdoors through large, untinted windows are plentiful—each of the occupants has five views from wherever he or she happens to sit. Delicious, affordable food and beverages are available to employees in a café that opens onto a sun-filled courtyard. In the office space, each of them controls the flow of fresh air and the temperature of their personal breathing zones. The windows open. The cooling system maximizes natural airflows, as in a hacienda: at night, the system flushes the building with cool evening air, bringing the temperature down and clearing the rooms of stale air and toxins. A layer of native grasses covers the building’s roof, making it more attractive to songbirds and absorbing water runoff, while at the same time protecting the roof from thermal shock and ultraviolet degradation. In fact, this building is just as energy-efficient as the first, but that is a side effect of a broader and more complex design goal: to create a building that celebrates a range of cultural and natural pleasures—sun, light, air, nature, even food—in order to enhance the lives of the people who work there. During construction, certain elements of the second building did cost a little more. For example, windows that open are more expensive than windows that do not. But the nighttime cooling strategy cuts down on the need for air-conditioning during the day. Abundant daylight diminish...

you might start to envision the difference between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness as the difference between an airless, fluorescent-lit gray cubicle and a sunlit area full of fresh air, natural views, and pleasant places to work, eat, and converse.

it is a manager’s job to “do things right.” It is an executive’s job to make sure “the right things” get done.

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things—on the right products and services and systems—instead of making the wrong things less bad.