Cradle to Cradle - book review



Title: Cradle To Cradle - Remaking The Way We Make Things

Authors: Michael Braungart & William McDonough

Publisher: Vintage Books, London

One of our aims in this blog is to highlight aspects of sustainability in new apartments. They're not necessarily the first questions you ask the developer, agent or architect when you're looking to buy, but we want to emphasise this in the reviews we do as a way of offering a perspective beyond the usual real estate listings. Of course price and location are important, but what about liveability, the quality or healthiness of the interior finishes, and the sustainability, both environmental and social, of the building?

For this reason, I found this book so fascinating in the way it takes a new approaches to the familiar idea of being eco-friendly, and thought it warranted a discussion on the blog. It is called Cradle to Cradle and is written jointly by a scientist, Michael Braungart, and an architect, William McDonough. I expected when I began this book to read about many of the approaches to sustainability that I already knew about. That sounds a little presumptuous, I know - but in the sustainability field there seems to be a lot of similar, albeit great, ideas going around. This wouldn't be so bad if the world was attempting to realistically achieve any of them...but that's another story I suppose.

This book, however, does not simply go beyond the existing approaches - it clearly and engagingly outlines an argument against mere "sustainability", against the lowly ambition of being 'neutral' or 'zero', and against the idea that you must hinder growth and development in order to save the world. And I say this as a strong believer that climate change is directly related to human activity, and that we must take drastic measures to stop it. (Just for the record.)

The authors argue against the idea of the 'eco-efficiency' movement, in which "The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero "ecological footprint....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, dishonourable, 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?" Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 67)

The authors discuss everything from product and textile design to the design of buildings as examples of how the producer or designer of these products can, with some effort, consider the ways in which the product can not just be 'less bad' but how it can actually be completely good.

One of the first examples that got me interested early on was the description of how recycling is not really what we think it is. It is easy to assume that by putting, say, a can of soft drink into a recycling bin we are doing the right thing. True, it is still better than throwing it away, but only marginally. Most recycling, according to the authors is simply a slow downgrading of materials until they ultimately end up in land-fill. A soft-drink can for example is actually made of two different types of aluminium - a higher quality and harder aluminium is used for the top and bottom of the can, while a softer, lower grade aluminium is used for the cylindrical part. There is currently no process for separating the two materials when the can is 'recycled', so the higher quality aluminium is combined with the low-grade aluminium - which produces an overall lower grade material than the original, and it is not able to be used again for another can. It has been down-graded, but not recycled.

Another example used is that of a paperback book - something which is ostensibly completely recyclable:

"Paper is biodegradable, but the inks that printed so crisply on the paper...contain carbon black and heavy metals. The jacket is not really paper, but an amalgam of materials - wood, pulp, polymers, and coatings, as well as inks, heavy metals, and halogenated hydrocarbons. It cannot be safely composted..." Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 68)

A second example of a book design also appears to be eco-friendly - they have opted for chlorine-free paper, as chlorine creates dioxins. But to get chlorine-free paper you need to use virgin pulp "What a quandary: pollute rivers or chew up forests?" Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 69)

This question is a key concept throughout the book. So often the label on a product appears to be good by claiming what it doesn't contain, like "chlorine-free". But as Cradle to Cradle suggests, unless the designers have done a really thorough job, the omission of a bad ingredient doesn't always signal a 100% good and healthy product. Often there are trade-offs. 

The authors offer a third example of what they consider a truly environmentally friendly design for a book, which goes against all intuition:

"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." Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 70)

Similarly the authors give an example of an environmentally friendly building. The first is what the current mainstream thought is on 'eco-friendly' design; the second is a complete shift in how we view eco-friendly buildings:

"We know what an eco-efficient building looks like. It is a big energy saver. It minimises 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 honours the building as the most energy-saving in its area and holds it up as a model for environmentally conscious design...." Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 73)

A better building, suggest the authors, would do it this way: "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 cafe 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 maximises 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..." Braungart & McDonough (2009, p. 74)

The second example is not ground-breaking in its particular technologies - building technologies such as night-purging is well known and currently used by some architects. The overall intention, however, is about focussing on good things - sunlight and fresh air - rather than on minimising bad things. The overall approach is positive. William McDonough, one of the authors, brought this approach to designing a factory for Herman Miller.

The book continues with many more real-life examples of projects and prototypes that were put into practice using the methodologies of cradle-to-cradle design. It is a little worrying when you get to the end of the book and realise in some ways how far we are from the ideals outlined in the book. We can't seem to even get the 'bad' ways of eco-efficiency right yet. And yet, maybe this is why we haven't got it right yet. An approach that celebrates development, growth, using something good rather than just not using something bad, and enriching the world, is surely easier to grapple with than the alternative? Or if it's not easier, the incentive of the greater quality of life found in the alternatives painted by the authors, is surely worth the effort.

  

References

Braungart, M & McDonough, W 2009, Cradle to Cradle; Re-Making the Way We Make Things, Vintage Books, London.