Book Review: Cradle to Cradle
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, published by North Point Press, 2002. (Amazon)
Picking up this environmental treatise on manufacturing goods, one notices something different about the physical book itself: the pages lack a familiar texture, grain, even sound as one flips through them. This difference comes from the fact the pages aren't paper -- derived from trees or recycled from other paper -- but synthetic, a plastic. While this might seem to go against common sense (surely paper made from renewable trees or recycled paper is better for the environment than man-made plastic?), it is just one of the many conventional wisdoms that the authors -- McDonough an architect and Braungart a chemist -- turn on their heads throughout its nearly 200 pages.
With their "cradle to cradle" (c2c) thinking, when paper and other other materials are recycled it is actually "downcycled", meaning its qualities is diminished. One example is that many plastics used for soda bottles and other household products eventually become things like park benches instead of more soda bottles. Sure, it's great to have park benches (without making judgment on the quality or the appropriateness of recycled benches over other designs) but if the soda bottle was "upcycled" back into a soda bottle, it would create a closed loop, a c2c cycle, as opposed to today's cradle to grave flow of goods.
Getting back to the book itself, its plastic pages are chemically designed to be upcycled back into paper. Even its ink is designed to wash off the pages with extremely hot water, unlike traditional inks on paper that require bleaching for their removal. So McDonough and Braungart have essentially made their book an advertisement for their thinking. With the book as an example, if everything we consume were made with the same c2c approach, the objects would be slightly different yet basically the same, though this might not apply to more harmful products that should be eliminated or rethought entirely (such as harsh household cleaners). Ultimately the authors are optimistic about our future, hopeful that humans can rethink and remake the world around them to fit into nature's cycles, a remarkably ambitious prospect but one not entirely impossible. Reading this book definitely helps give the reader an understanding of what surrounds them and then hopefully spurs them to not accept the conventional wisdom that made it what it was.
Picking up this environmental treatise on manufacturing goods, one notices something different about the physical book itself: the pages lack a familiar texture, grain, even sound as one flips through them. This difference comes from the fact the pages aren't paper -- derived from trees or recycled from other paper -- but synthetic, a plastic. While this might seem to go against common sense (surely paper made from renewable trees or recycled paper is better for the environment than man-made plastic?), it is just one of the many conventional wisdoms that the authors -- McDonough an architect and Braungart a chemist -- turn on their heads throughout its nearly 200 pages.
With their "cradle to cradle" (c2c) thinking, when paper and other other materials are recycled it is actually "downcycled", meaning its qualities is diminished. One example is that many plastics used for soda bottles and other household products eventually become things like park benches instead of more soda bottles. Sure, it's great to have park benches (without making judgment on the quality or the appropriateness of recycled benches over other designs) but if the soda bottle was "upcycled" back into a soda bottle, it would create a closed loop, a c2c cycle, as opposed to today's cradle to grave flow of goods.
Getting back to the book itself, its plastic pages are chemically designed to be upcycled back into paper. Even its ink is designed to wash off the pages with extremely hot water, unlike traditional inks on paper that require bleaching for their removal. So McDonough and Braungart have essentially made their book an advertisement for their thinking. With the book as an example, if everything we consume were made with the same c2c approach, the objects would be slightly different yet basically the same, though this might not apply to more harmful products that should be eliminated or rethought entirely (such as harsh household cleaners). Ultimately the authors are optimistic about our future, hopeful that humans can rethink and remake the world around them to fit into nature's cycles, a remarkably ambitious prospect but one not entirely impossible. Reading this book definitely helps give the reader an understanding of what surrounds them and then hopefully spurs them to not accept the conventional wisdom that made it what it was.
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