Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

"This talks about ways to evolve efficiently. It calls for products that can be circulated infinitely in industrial cycles. It envisions using products in a whole new way. In this vision, consumers become borrowers: You make products with sustainable resources and when you’re done using them, you find a way to recycle or to integrate them back into the environment in a healthy way. That’s an excellent question. The philosophy is that when you use and discard something, it either gets completely reused or is discarded in a way that’s healthier for the environment. So it’s really a different philosophy, and it’s going to take a pretty significant change in our mindset of how we develop and use resources to get there. The most important aspect of creating a “zero waste” society is finding ways to encourage the chemical industry to create materials that are durable, recyclable and non-toxic. The book says we can find a way to make all the products we need with fewer and safer resources. It goes through a list of materials that can be used and it’s a fairly short list, whereas the list of chemicals out there is in the tens of thousands. Public policy can influence what type of materials enter the industrial cycle."

"I read this book with excitement in a single sitting because it helped me to reimagine how industry could be designed to work with, rather than against, the cycles of the living world. And, for me, realising that economics is a question of design was a very important part of the insight. Back in the 19th century, economists were desperate to make economics a science as reputable as physics, and so they modelled it on Newtonian physics, and since Newton had discovered the physical laws of motion, they set off a century-long search for equivalent economic laws of motion. But these turned out to be spurious. Economics is actually far better thought of as a question of design. If you shift into a systems thinking space and reflect on Donella Meadows talking about how we can intervene in systems, we’re effectively stewarding a dynamic system, helping to redesign it towards our own goals. And this book Cradle to Cradle is all about design. As Braungart and McDonough say, design is the first signal of human intention. The book really made me think that economics should aspire far less to be like physics, searching for laws, and more like architecture and design, by asking what kinds of institutions we need—from the design of business to the way that property is owned or shared. Each of these institutional arrangements is a form of design, and each will create different patterns in the economy. “Why only be less bad if actually you could do good?” This book explores how to design industrial systems based on some very clear principles like: waste equals food. Nothing in nature goes to waste; it all goes back as food for the next process. So how can we create industrial processes that go from cradle to cradle to cradle, endlessly reusing earth’s materials? You often hear people talking about creating a ‘more sustainable’ world, and ensuring that our business will be ‘better for sustainability.’ We seem always to be teetering towards being less bad as though the best thing you could be is almost not bad at all. But in this book the authors break through the glass ceiling of imagination and say, ‘why only be less bad if actually you could do good?’ Why, for example, aim for agriculture that releases as little carbon as possible from the soil when could you pursue another agricultural model that actually sequesters carbon? How can industrial processes help to regenerate the living world instead of merely avoiding running it down? I love the ambition. Again, it’s a paradigm change. And it all comes down to the question of design. So for me, this book helped in dislodging the metaphor I’d inherited that economics is like physics and we are searching for laws, to taking on a 21st century outlook, which is that economics should be more like architecture, and focus on the design of institutions. This is deeply political because we come to talk about power: about who owns enterprise, who owns the power to create money, and who owns the land. We put power at the heart of economics which, of course, was always missing."