Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

by William McDonough

The marvelous thing about effective systems is that one wants more of them, not less.

Urban and industrial growth is often referred to as a cancer, a thing that grows for its own sake and not for the sake of the organism it inhabits.

The perceived conflict between nature and industry made it look as if the values of one system must be sacrificed to the other.

there are things we all want to grow, and things we don’t want to grow. We wish to grow education and not ignorance, health and not sickness, prosperity and not destitution, clean water and not poisoned water. We wish to improve the quality of life.

The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, ...

Individually we are much larger than ants, but collectively their biomass exceeds ours. Just as there is almost no corner of the globe untouched by human presence, there is almost no land habitat, from harsh desert to inner city, untouched by some species of ant. They are a good example of a population whose density and productiveness are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature. All their materials, even their most deadly chemical weapons, are biodegradable, and when they return to the soil, they supply nutrients, restoring in the process some of those that were taken to support the colony. Ants also recycle the wastes of other species; leaf-cutter ants, for example, collect decomposing matter from the Earth’s surface, carry it down into their colonies, and use it to feed the fungus gardens that they grow underground for food.

Some people use the term nature’s services to refer to the processes by which, without human help, water and air are purified; erosion, floods, and drought are mitigated; materials are detoxified and decomposed; soil is created and its fertility renewed; ecological equilibrium and diversity are maintained; climate is stabilized; and, not least, aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction is provided to us.

The consequences of growth—increases in insects, microorganisms, birds, water cycling, and nutrient flows—tend toward the positive kind that enrich the vitality of the whole ecosystem. The consequences of a new strip mall, on the other hand, while they may have some immediate local benefits (jobs, more money circulating through the local economy) and may even boost the country’s overall GDP, are gained at the expense of a decline in overall quality of life—increased traffic, asphalt, pollution, and waste—that ultimately undermines even some of the mall’s ostensible benefits.

Just about every process has side effects. But they can be deliberate and sustaining instead of unintended and pernicious. We can be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of nature’s activity, and we can also be inspired by it to design some positive side effects to our own enterprises instead of focusing exclusively on a single end.

green roofs that will not only keep it cool but produce solar energy and grow food and flowers, as well as providing soothing green sanctuary from busy urban streets to birds and people alike.

What autumn leaves there are must be quickly gathered from the ground, placed in plastic bags, and landfilled or burned rather than composted. Instead of trying to optimize nature’s abundance, we automatically try to get it out of the way.

while we recognize the great scientific value of space exploration and the exciting potential of new discovery there, and while we applaud technological innovations that enable humans to “boldly go where no man has gone before,” we caution: Let’s not make a big mess here and go somewhere less hospitable even if we figure out how. Let’s use our ingenuity to stay here; to become, once again, native to this planet.

humans can incorporate the best of technology and culture so that our civilized places reflect a new view.

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.

Soils now yield more crops than they naturally could, but with some severe effects: they are eroding at an unprecedented rate, and they are drained of nutrient-rich humus. Very few small farmers return local biological wastes to the soil as a primary source of nutrients any longer, and industrialized farming almost never does.

Humans are the only species that takes from the soil vast quantities of nutrients needed for biological processes but rarely puts them back in a usable form.

Harvesting methods like clear-cutting precipitate soil erosion, and chemical processes used in both agriculture and manufacture often lead to salinization and acidification, helping to deplete more than twenty times as much soil each year as nature creates.