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Why do we design plastic containers which exist over 500 years, even though their contents will not last more than a day, a month or a year at the most?
Why do we use 23.000 kilograms of raw material to build a 1,300-kilogram- car?
Why do we design products in such a way that, once they have served their purpose,they are to be discarded and valuable materials are lost in the process?
Is this intelligent and profitable business?
Architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, the founders of the business concept "Cradle to Cradle", would answer this question with a definite "no". In their book "Cradle to Cradle, Remaking the Way We Make Things" they point out that our current problems with enormous amounts of waste and pollution cannot be solved if we ‘reduce, reuse, recycle', as environmentalists urge us to do. With the "Cradle to Cradle" concept they challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world.
Waste equals food
In nature there is no such thing as waste. A cherry tree makes many blossoms and fruit to germinate and grow. There are far too many blossoms, but the extra blossoms are far from useless. They fall to the ground, decompose, feed various organisms and enrich the soil. This biological system has nourished our planet for millions of years. Growth was good. It meant more trees, more species, greater diversity, and more complex, resilient ecosystems. With the start of the Industrial Revolution all this changed. People took substances from the earth altered and synthesized them into vast quantities which cannot safely be returned to soil.
With the Cradle-to-Cradle principle, McDonough and Braungart envision a world where human industry operates exactly like a cherry tree: every factory, every building and every product is designed to be a nutrient and return either to the biological cycle or to the technical cycle. Every building is like a tree: it uses solar energy, produces food and oxygen, absorbs CO2, distills water, creates habitat for other species and changes with the seasons. Products are made from materials that are beneficial for people and their surroundings and can serve as a biological or as a technical nutrient (a material or product that is designed to go back into the technical cycle).
Eco-effectiveness
Products or buildings that are designed according to the Cradle to Cradle design strategy are eco-effective. Eco-effectiveness means producing the right thing, the right service, the right product, rather than making the wrong thing less bad. The cherry tree, with its abundance of blossoms and fruits, is not efficient by modern standards, but it is eco-effective because it feeds organisms en enriches the soil,
Eco-effectiveness seeks to design industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature. When a product returns to industry at the end of its useful life and its materials are used to make equally valuable new products, the minerals or plastics of which it is made do not need to be minimized-because they will not become waste in a landfill. Industry saves billions of dollars annually by recovering valuable materials from used products. Similarly, products designed to be made of natural, safely biodegradable materials can be returned to the soil to feed ecosystems instead of depleting them.
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