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  The mill interviewed people living in wheelchairs and discovered that their most important needs in seating fabric were that it be strong and that it “breathe.” The team decided on a mixture of safe, pesticide-free plant and animal fibers for the fabric: wool, which provides insulation in winter and summer, and ramie, which wicks moisture away. Together these fibers would make for a strong and comfortable fabric. Then we began working on the most difficult aspect of the design: the finishes, dyes, and other process chemicals. Instead of filtering out mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, persistent toxins, and bioaccumulative substances at the end of the process, we would filter them out at the beginning. In fact, we would go beyond designing a fabric that would do no harm; we would design one that was nutritious.

  Sixty chemical companies declined the invitation to join the project, uncomfortable at the idea of exposing their chemistry to the kind of scrutiny it would require. Finally one European company agreed to join. With its help, we eliminated from consideration almost eight thousand chemicals that are commonly used in the textile industry; we also thereby eliminated the need for additives and corrective processes. Not using a given dye, for example, removed the need for additional toxic chemicals and processes to ensure ultraviolet-light stabilization (that is, colorfastness). Then we looked for ingredients that had positive qualities. We ended up selecting only thirty-eight of them, from which we created the entire fabric line. What might seem like an expensive and laborious research process turned out to solve multiple problems and to contribute to a higher-quality product that was ultimately more economical.

  The fabric went into production. The factory director later told us that when regulators came on their rounds and tested the effluent (the water coming out of the factory), they thought their instruments were broken. They could not identify any pollutants, not even elements they knew were in the water when it came into the factory. To confirm that their testing equipment was actually in working order, they checked the influent from the town’s water mains. The equipment was fine; it was simply that by most parameters the water coming out of the factory was as clean as—or even cleaner than—the water going in. When a factory’s effluent is cleaner than its influent, it might well prefer to use its effluent as influent. Being designed into the manufacturing process, this dividend is free and requires no enforcement to continue or to exploit. Not only did our new design process bypass the traditional responses to environmental problems (reduce, reuse, recycle), it also eliminated the need for regulation, something that any businessperson will appreciate as extremely valuable.

  The process had additional positive side effects. Employees began to use, for recreation and additional work space, rooms that were previously reserved for hazardous-chemical storage. Regulatory paperwork was eliminated. Workers stopped wearing the gloves and masks that had given them a thin veil of protection against workplace toxins. The mill’s products became so successful that it faced a new problem: financial success, just the kind of problem businesses want to have.

  As a biological nutrient, the fabric embodied the kind of fecundity we find in nature’s work. After customers finished using it, they could simply tear the fabric off the chair frame and throw it onto the soil or compost heap without feeling bad—even, perhaps, with a kind of relish. Throwing something away can be fun, let’s admit it; and giving a guilt-free gift to the natural world is an incomparable pleasure.

  The Technical Metabolism

  A technical nutrient is a material or product that is designed to go back into the technical cycle, into the industrial metabolism from which it came. The average television we analyzed, for example, was made of 4,360 chemicals. Some of them are toxic, but others are valuable nutrients for industry that are wasted when the television ends up in a landfill. Isolating them from biological nutrients allows them to be upcycled rather than recycled—to retain their high quality in a closed-loop industrial cycle. Thus a sturdy plastic computer case, for example, will continually circulate as a sturdy plastic computer case—or as some other high-quality product, like a car part or a medical device—instead of being downcycled into soundproof barriers and flowerpots.

  Henry Ford practiced an early form of upcycling when he had Model A trucks shipped in crates that became the vehicle’s floorboards when it reached its destination. We are initiating a similar practice that is a modest beginning: Korean rice husks used as packing for stereo components and electronics sent to Europe, then reused there as a material for making bricks. (Rice husks contain a high percentage of silica.) The packing material is nontoxic (rice husks are safer than recycled newspapers, which contain toxic inks and particles that contaminate indoor air); its shipping is inclusive in the freight costs the electronic goods would incur anyway; and the concept of waste is eliminated.

  Industrial mass can be specifically designed to retain its high quality for multiple uses. Currently, when an automobile is discarded, its component steel is recycled as an amalgam of all its steel parts, along with the various steel alloys of other products. The car is crushed, pressed, and processed so that high-ductile steel from the body and stainless steels are smelted together with various other scrap steels and materials, compromising their high quality and drastically restricting their further use. (It can’t, for example, be used to make car bodies again.) The copper in its cables is melded into a general compound and lost to specific technical purposes—it can no longer be used as a copper cable. A more prosperous design would allow the car to be used the way Native Americans used a buffalo carcass, optimizing every element, from tongue to tail. Metals would be smelted only with like metals, to retain their high quality; likewise for plastics.

  In order for such a scenario to be practical, however, we have to introduce a concept that goes hand in hand with the notion of a technical nutrient: the concept of a product of service. Instead of assuming that all products are to be bought, owned, and disposed of by “consumers,” products containing valuable technical nutrients—cars, televisions, carpeting, computers, and refrigerators, for example—would be reconceived as services people want to enjoy. In this scenario, customers (a more apt term for the users of these products) would effectively purchase the service of such a product for a defined user period—say, ten thousand hours of television viewing, rather than the television itself. They would not be paying for complex materials that they won’t be able to use after a product’s current life. When they finish with the product, or are simply ready to upgrade to a newer version, the manufacturer replaces it, taking the old model back, breaking it down, and using its complex materials as food for new products. The customers would receive the services they need for as long as they need them and could upgrade as often as desired; manufacturers would continue to grow and develop while retaining ownership of their materials.

  A number of years ago we worked on a “rent-a-solvent” concept for a chemical company. A solvent is a chemical that is used to remove grease, for example, from machine parts. Companies ordinarily buy the cheapest degreasing solvent available, even if it comes from halfway around the globe. After its use, the waste solvent is either evaporated or entered into a waste treatment flow, to be handled by a sewage treatment plant. The idea behind rent-a-solvent was to provide a degreasing service using high-quality solvents available to customers without selling the solvent itself; the provider would recapture the emissions and separate the solvent from the grease so that it would be available for continuous reuse. Under these circumstances, the company had incentive to use high-quality solvents (how else to retain customers?) and to reuse it, with the important side effect of keeping toxic materials out of waste flows. Dow Chemical has experimented with this concept in Europe, and DuPont is taking up this idea vigorously.

  This scenario has tremendous implications for industry’s material wealth. When customers finish with a traditional carpet, for example, they must pay to have it removed. At that point its materials are a liability, not an asset—they are a heap of petroc
hemicals and other potentially toxic substances that must be toted to a landfill. This linear, cradle-to-grave life cycle has several negative consequences for both people and industry. The energy, effort, and materials that were put into manufacturing the carpet are lost to the manufacturer once the customer purchases it. Millions of pounds of potential nutrients for the carpet industry alone are wasted each year, and new raw materials must continually be extracted. Customers who decide they want or need new carpeting are inconvenienced, financially burdened with a new purchase (the cost of the unrecoverable materials must be built into the price), and, if they are environmentally concerned, taxed with guilt as well about disposing of the old and purchasing the new.

  Carpet companies have been among the first industries to adopt our product-of-service or “eco-leasing” concepts, but so far they have applied them to conventionally designed products. An average commercial carpet consists of nylon fibers backed with fiberglass and PVC. After the product’s useful life, a manufacturer typically downcycles it—shaves off some of the nylon material for further use and discards the leftover material “soup.” Alternately, the manufacturer may chop up the whole thing, remelt it, and use it to make more carpet backing. Such a carpet was not originally designed to be recycled and is being forced into another cycle for which it is not ideally suited. But carpeting designed as a true technical nutrient would be made of safe materials designed to be truly recycled as raw material for fresh carpeting, and the delivery system for its service would cost the same as or less than buying it. One of our ideas for a new design would combine a durable bottom layer with a detachable top. When a customer wants to replace the carpeting, the manufacturer simply removes the top, snaps down a fresh one in the desired color, and takes the old one back as food for further carpeting.

  Under this scenario, people could indulge their hunger for new products as often as they wish, without guilt, and industry could encourage them to do so with impunity, knowing that both sides are supporting the technical metabolism in the process. Automobile manufacturers would want people to turn in their old cars in order to regain valuable industrial nutrients. Instead of waving industrial resources good-bye as the customer drives off in a new car, never to enter the dealership again, automobile companies could develop lasting and valuable relationships that enhance customers’ quality of life for many decades and that continually enrich the industry itself with industrial “food.”

  Designing products as products of service means designing them to be disassembled. Industry need not design what it makes to be durable beyond a certain amount of time, any more than nature does. The durability of many current products could even be seen as a kind of intergenerational tyranny. Maybe we want our things to live forever, but what do future generations want? What about their right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, to a celebration of their own abundance of nutrients, of materials, of delight? Manufacturers would, however, have permanent responsibility for storing and, if it is possible to do so safely, reusing whatever potentially hazardous materials their products contain. What better incentive to evolve a design that does without the hazardous materials entirely?

  The advantages of this system, when fully implemented, would be threefold: it would produce no useless and potentially dangerous waste; it would save manufacturers billions of dollars in valuable materials over time; and, because nutrients for new products are constantly circulated, it would diminish the extraction of raw materials (such as petrochemicals) and the manufacture of potentially disruptive materials, such as PVC, and eventually phase them out, resulting in more savings to the manufacturer and enormous benefit to the environment.

  A number of products are already being designed as biological and technical nutrients. But for the foreseeable future, many products will still not fit either category, a potentially dangerous situation. In addition, certain products cannot be confined to one metabolism exclusively because of the way they are used in the world. These products demand special attention.

  When Worlds Collide

  If a product must, for the time being, remain a “monstrous hybrid,” it may take extra ingenuity to design and market it to have positive consequences for both the biological and technical metabolisms. Consider the unintended design legacy of the average pair of running shoes, something many of us own. While you are going for your walk or run, an activity that supposedly contributes to your health and well-being, each pounding of your shoes releases into the environment tiny particles containing chemicals that may be teratogens, carcinogens, or other substances that can reduce fertility and inhibit the oxidizing properties of cells. The next rain will wash these particles into the plants and soil around the road. (If the soles of your athletic shoes contain a special bubble filled with gases for cushioning—some of which were recently discovered factors in global warming—you may also be contributing to climate change.) Running shoes can be redesigned so that their soles are biological nutrients. Then when they breaks down under pounding feet, they will nourish the organic metabolism instead of poisoning it. As long as the uppers remain technical nutrients, however, the shoes would be designed for easy disassembly in order to be safely recirculated in both cycles (with the technical materials to be retrieved by the manufacturer). Retrieving technical nutrients from the shoes of famous athletes—and advertising the fact—could give an athletic-gear company a competitive edge.

  Some materials do not fit into either the organic or technical metabolism because they contain materials that are hazardous. We call them unmarketables, and until technological ways of detoxifying them—or doing without them—have been developed, they also require creative measures. They can be stored in “parking lots”—safe repositories that the producer of the material either maintains or pays a storage fee to use. Current unmarketables can be recalled for safe storage, until they can be detoxified and returned as valuable molecules to a safe human use. Nuclear waste is clearly an unmarketable; in a pure sense, the definition should also include materials known to have hazardous components. PVC is one such example: instead of being incinerated or landfilled, it might instead be safely “parked” until cost-effective detoxification technologies have evolved. As currently made, PET, with its antimony content, is another unmarketable: with some technological ingenuity, items that contain PET, such as soda bottles, might even be upcycled to remove the antimony residues and to create a clean polymer ready for continuous, safe reuse.

  Companies might undertake a waste phaseout, in which unmarketables—problematic wastes and nutrients—are removed from the current waste stream. Certain polyesters now on the market could be gathered and their problematic antimony removed. This would be preferable to leaving them in textiles, where they will eventually be disposed of or incinerated, perhaps therefore to enter natural systems and nutrient flows. The materials in certain monstrous hybrids could be similarly gathered and separated. Cotton could be composted out of polyester-cotton textile blends, and the polyester then returned to technical cycles. Shoe companies might recover chromium from shoes. Other industries might retrieve parts of television sets and other service products from landfills. Making a successful transition requires leadership in these areas as well as creative owning up.

  Should manufacturers of existing products feel guilty about their complicity in this heretofore destructive agenda? Yes. No. It doesn’t matter. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Negligence is described as doing the same thing over and over even though you know it is dangerous, stupid, or wrong. Now that we know, it’s time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.

  Chapter Five

  Respect Diversity

  IMAGINE THE PRIMORDIAL beginning of life on this planet. There is rock and water—matter. The orb of the sun sends out heat and light—energy. Eventually, over thousands of millennia, through chemical and physical processes scientists still don’t fully understand, single-celled bacteria emerge. With the evolution o
f photosynthesizing blue-green algae, a monumental change takes place. Chemistry and physics combine with the sun’s physical energy, and the Earth’s chemical mass turns into the blue-green planet we know.

  Now biological systems evolve to feed on energy from the sun, and all heaven breaks loose. The planet’s surface explodes with life forms, a web of diverse organisms, plants, and animals, some of which, billions of years later, will inspire powerful religions, discover cures for fatal diseases, and write great poems. Even if some natural disaster occurs—if, say, an ice age freezes large parts of the earth’s surface—this pattern is not destroyed. As the ice retreats, life creeps back. In the tropics, a volcano erupts and smothers the surrounding land in ash. But a coconut shell floats across waters and ends up as debris on a beach, or a spore or spiderling moves through air, lands on a crumbling rock, and begins to reweave nature’s web. It’s a mysterious process, but a miraculously stubborn one. When faced with blankness, nature rises to fill in the space.