Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

by William McDonough

The environmental message that “consumers” take from all this can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter how inconvenient, to limit your “consumption.” Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children—or none. Aren’t the major environmental problems today—global warming, deforestation, pollution, waste—products of your decadent Western way of life? If you are going to help save the planet, you will have to make some sacrifices, share some resources, perhaps even go without. And fairly soon you must face a world of limits. There is only so much the Earth can take. Sound like fun?

Imagine that you have been given the assignment of designing the Industrial Revolution—retrospectively. With respect to its negative consequences, the assignment would have to read something like this: Design a system of production that • puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year • produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations • results in gigantic amounts of waste • puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved • requires thousands of complex regulations—not to keep people and natural systems safe, but rather to keep them from being poisoned too quickly • measures productivity by how few people are working • creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them • erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices.

In the nineteenth century, when these practices began, the subtle qualities of the environment were not a widespread concern. Resources seemed immeasurably vast. Nature itself was perceived as a “mother earth” who, perpetually regenerative, would absorb all things and continue to grow. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prescient philosopher and poet with a careful eye for nature, reflected a common belief when, in the early 1830s, he described nature as “essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” Many people believed there would always be an expanse that remained unspoiled and innocent. The popular fiction of Rudyard Kipling and others evoked wild parts of the world that still existed and, it seemed, always would.

Think about it: you may be referred to as a consumer, but there is very little that you actually consume—some food, some liquids. Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. But where is “away”? Of course, “away” does not really exist. “Away” has gone away.

The First Essay, published in 1798, was framed as a response to essayist and utopian William Godwin, who often espoused man’s “perfectibility.” “I have read some of the speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society with great pleasure,” Malthus wrote. “I have been warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth.” But, he concluded, “The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

Real wisdom, he claimed, “can be found only inside oneself,” enabling one to “see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends.”

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. In Hamburg, Germany, some trees’ leaves contain such high concentrations of heavy metals from incinerator fallout that the leaves themselves must be burned, effecting a vicious cycle with a dual effect: valuable materials, such as these metals, bioaccumulate in nature to possible harmful effect and are lost to industries forever.

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.

If we were to take a similar look at industry under the influence of the ecoefficiency movement, the results might look like this: Design a system of industry that will: • release fewer pounds of toxic wastes into the air, soil, and water every year • measure prosperity by less activity • meet the stipulations of thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly • produce fewer materials that are so dangerous that they will require future generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror • result in smaller amounts of useless waste • put smaller amounts of valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved.

Last but not least, efficiency isn’t much fun. In a world dominated by efficiency, each development would serve only narrow and practical purposes. Beauty, creativity, fantasy, enjoyment, inspiration, and poetry would fall by the wayside, creating an unappealing world indeed. Imagine a fully efficient world: an Italian dinner would be a red pill and a glass of water with an artificial aroma. Mozart would hit the piano with a two-by-four. Van Gogh would use one color. Whitman’s sprawling “Song of Myself” would fit on a single page. And what about efficient sex? An efficient world is not one we envision as delightful. In contrast to nature, it is downright parsimonious.

As long as human beings are regarded as “bad,” zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the “be less bad” approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root, and grow. Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, “How inefficient and wasteful!” The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plants, animals, and soil. Although the tree actually makes more of its “product” than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure or, in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree’s fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.

So 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.

In Western society, people have graves, and so do products. We enjoy the idea of ourselves as powerful, unique individuals; and we like to buy things that are brand-new, made of materials that are “virgin.” Opening a new product is a kind of metaphorical defloration: “This virgin product is mine, for the very first time. When I am finished with it (special, unique person that I am), everyone is. It is history.” Industries design and plan according to this mind-set.

If humans are truly going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist. To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things—products, packaging, and systems—from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. It means that the valuable nutrients contained in the materials shape and determine the design: form follows evolution, not just function. We think this is a more robust prospect than the current way of making things.

There is no need for shampoo bottles, toothpaste tubes, yogurt and ice-cream cartons, juice containers, and other packaging to last decades (or even centuries) longer than what came inside them. Why should individuals and communities be burdened with downcycling or landfilling such material?

By seeing sustainability as both a local and a global event, we can understand that just as it is not viable to poison local water and air with waste, it is equally unacceptable to send it downstream, or to ship it overseas to other, less regulated shores.

Instead of promoting a one-size-fits-all aesthetic, industries can design in the potential for “mass” customization, allowing packaging and products to be adapted to local tastes and traditions without compromising the integrity of the product.

According to visual preference surveys, most people see culturally distinctive communities as desirable environments in which to live. When they are shown fast-food restaurants or generic-looking buildings, they score the images very low. They prefer quaint New England streets to modern suburbs, even though they may live in developments that destroyed the Main Streets in their very own hometowns. When given the opportunity, people choose something other than that which they are typically offered in most one-size-fits-all designs: the strip, the subdivision, the mall. People want diversity because it brings them more pleasure and delight. They want a world of four hundred cheeses.

While capitalism had often ignored the interest of the worker in the pursuit of its economic goals, socialism, when single-mindedly pursued as an ism, also failed. If nothing belongs to anyone but the state, the individual can be diminished by the system. This happened in the former USSR, where government denied fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech. The environment also suffered: scientists have deemed 16 percent of the former Soviet state unsafe to inhabit, due to industrial pollution and contamination so severe it has been termed “ecocide.”