Societies should also deploy systems aimed at collecting and recovering the value of these materials following their use. Industries should produce materials that could be reused perpetually. First is the elimination of the concept of waste. Nevertheless, it is fundamentally a criticism of the popular corporate phrase “cradle to grave,” which describes traditional production and consumption models within a linear economy characterized by the life cycle of a product beginning as a raw material extracted from nature and ending as waste materials in landfills.īraungart and McDonough laid down key tenets for integrating the C2C approach within the economy. It also sees wastes as everlasting resources that could be reintroduced back into the economy. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are).Įlaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.Understanding the Principles of Cradle to CradleĬradle to Cradle or C2C is a design approach to production and consumption based on biomimicry or processes found in nature that considers resources and materials as “nutrients” circulating indefinitely within the economy in a feedback-rich closed-loop. In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.
As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism
0 kommentar(er)
