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Cradle to Cradle and Al Gore
What do Cradle to Cradle and Al Gore have in common? At first glance, maybe not a lot. But dig a little deeper and you will find the Planet Prosperity Foundation. This young organisation initiated a one month simultaneous free showing of Gore's shoking climate film "An Inconvenënt Truth" in 20 city cinema's throughout the Netherlands. This initiative surged Dutch interest in the climate and helped push political debate in the right direction.
Planet Prosperity’s youngest initiative was launched under the slogan "Let’s Cradle!" It aims to generate attention for the environmentally and enterprise friendly production principle: “Cradle to Cradle”, as defined by chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough. According to founder Roger Cox "First awareness of problems is elementary. Then one should focus on sollutions".
Nice, you might think. But think again. Because the campain proved to be at least partly instrumental in hooking the Dutch on Cradle to Cradle. The very persuasive VPRO television documentary Waste = Food and the lauch of the translation of the book Cradle to Cradle, remaking the way we make things into Dutch (by Annemarie Rakhorst) and the Let's Cradle campain proved a "holy trinity" in tickling Dutch company's to start cradling! The Minister for environment has made it part of her programme and has given the subsidiesoffice Senternovem (for Environment and Economics) free rain when promoting Cradle to Cradle.
But were the Dutch frontrunners? To be truthfull, not really. Great company's like Ford and Nike and even a country, like China were already applying the concept succesfully. Ford actually invested 2 billion dollars to rebuild their USA production plant according to the Cradle to Cradle principles, with enourmous profit. Office furniture gigants like Steelcase and Herman Miller have been succesfully applying the principle. Carpetmanufacturer Shaw Industries has remodelled their entire business to Cradle to Cradle principles. All are profitting and are going to be apparent frontrunners when prices of raw materials and energy keep surging as they have been.
Cradle to Cradle seems to be the first sound environmentally friendly moneymaking businessproposal. And that is just what Planet Prosperity focussed on, specifically with their campaign and congress-event last November. Click here for the complete programme. To view film-images of the conference click here.
Watch VPRO television/Backlight's documentary with English commentary here.
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About Planet Prosperity
The Planet Prosperity Foundation was founded in January 2007 in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Its statutory goal is to unify prosperity for nature, people and business, as well as to initiate and participate in activities that are beneficial to this goal. The Planet Prosperity Foundation is not a political institution and does not wish to point fingers at anyone. On the contrary, it wishes to build bridges between the general public, businesses and both governmental and non governmental institutions. It wishes to look forward in the realization that each of us has a share in the state of our earth (aware or unaware), and believes that we may be better inhabitants to this planet if all parties join forces.
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