Cradle to Cradle Read online

  Connecting to natural flows allows us to rethink everything under the sun: the very concept of power plants, of energy, habitation, and transportation. It means merging ancient and new technologies for the most intelligent designs we have yet seen. What it doesn’t mean, however, is to become “independent.” The popular image of going solar is linked to the concept of “going off the grid”—becoming cut off from the current energy infrastructure. This is not at all what we are implying. First of all, a renewed connection to natural flows will of necessity be gradual, and making use of existing systems is a sensible transitional strategy. Hybrid systems can be designed to draw upon local renewable energy flows in addition to artificial sources while more optimized solutions are being developed and implemented. In some cases, solar power—and also wind and water power—can be channeled into the current system of energy supplies, greatly diminishing the load of artificial energy needed and even saving money. Is this eco-efficiency? By all means. But it is eco-efficiency as a tool in service to a larger vision, not as a goal in itself.

  In the long run, connecting to natural energy flows is a matter of reestablishing our fundamental connection to the source of all good growth on the planet: the sun, that tremendous nuclear power plant 93 million miles away (exactly where we want it). Even at such distances, the sun’s heat can be devastating, and it commands a healthy respect for the delicate orchestration of circumstances that makes natural energy flows possible. Humans thrive on the earth under such intense emanations of heat and light only because billions of years of evolutionary processes have created the atmosphere and surface that support our existence—the soil, plant life, and cloud cover that cool the planet down and distribute water around it, keeping the atmosphere within a temperate range that we can live in. So reestablishing our connection to the sun by definition includes maintaining interdependence with all the other ecological circumstances that make natural energy flows possible in the first place.

  Here are some thoughts on—and examples of—ways of optimizing energy production and use, in which diversity plays a key role.

  A Transition to Diverse and Renewing Energy Flows

  Earlier, we considered how diversity makes an ecosystem more resilient and able to respond successfully to change. During times of unexpected disruption—like the summer of 2001, when unusually high energy demand in California led to rolling blackouts, skyrocketing prices, even accusations of profiteering—a more complex system can adapt and survive. The same is true of an economic system: a distributed industry makes for many small players, and a more stable, resilient system for both providers and customers. And from an eco-effective perspective, the greatest innovations in energy supply are being made by small-scale plants at the local level. For example, in our work with one utility in Indiana, it appears that producing power at the scale of one small plant for every three city blocks is dramatically more effective than more centralized production. The shorter distances reduce the power lost in high-voltage transmission to insignificant levels.

  Nuclear power plants and other large-scale energy providers throw off tremendous heat energy that goes unused and often disrupts the surrounding ecosystem, as when it is cooled by way of a neighboring river. With smaller utilities, it becomes possible to harness waste heat to feed local needs. For example, the hot water generated by a small fuel cell or micro-turbine installed in a restaurant, say, or even a residence, can be put to immediate use, a terrific convenience (and savings) to businesses and homeowners.

  Rather than install more large-scale power-generating equipment to meet peak energy loads, utility companies can integrate solar collectors as products of service with systems currently in use. Residents and businesses could be asked for permission to lease their south-facing or flat roofs for this purpose, or to access solar collectors already in place. (These roofs need not look like castoffs from the space program, by the way. The ubiquitous flat commercial roof is easy to solarize, and the least expensive solar arrays are simply laid down like tiles. In many parts of California they are cost-effective now.) During peak use times, this diversely supplied system is much more in tune with its own peaks; the highest demand on the power system is created by the desire for air-conditioning, when the sun is high—exactly when solar collectors are working best. It can meet periods of intense demand much more flexibly than centralized energy monocultures of coal, gas, and nuclear power.

  Another approach to the dramatic (and expensive) fluctuations in energy demand: “intelligent” appliances that receive information about the current price of power along with the power itself, and choose from alternate power sources accordingly, like a broker instructed to buy or sell according to the rise and fall of a given stock price. Why should you be paying prime-time rates to have your refrigerator chill your milk at two o’clock on a summer afternoon, when air-conditioning use has the city on the verge of rolling blackouts? Instead, your appliance could decide—according to criteria you determine—when to buy power and when to turn to a block of eutectic salts or ice that it conveniently froze the night before, ready to keep your refrigerator cool until demand and price come down. It’s back to the future: voilà, you have an icebox. But you’re availing yourself of the cheapest, most readily available power for a simple process, and you’re not competing with the needs of a hospital emergency room to do so.

  A similar focus on diversity and immediately available resources resulted in a breakthrough in energy use in a large automotive manufacturing facility. The engineers were having a difficult time finding an affordable way to make workers comfortable. All the little things that could save money weren’t adding up to much. They were working with a typical approach to heating and cooling, in which thermostats placed near burners and air-conditioning units up near the roof sensed the need to cool or heat the building. In winter, hot air rose toward the roof, drawing in cold air from outside, and had to be heated again by burners and pumped down to displace the cold air it drew in. All this motion of air created an unwelcome breeze that required even more heating to counteract.

  An engineer named Tom Kiser, of Professional Supply Incorporated, proposed a radical new strategy. Rather than drilling columns of cooled or heated air (as the seasons required) down toward employees at high speed from “efficiently designed” fans and ducts at the top of the building, he suggested approaching the building itself as a giant duct. When the building was pressurized with the help of four “bigfoots”—simple large units—any holes in the structure, windows and doors, for example, could be made to pass air like pinholes in an inner tube, leaking air out rather than letting it in. This had some significant benefits. In warm weather, you could simply drop a blanket of temperate air in the building, and it would sink to the factory floor without the need for multiple air-conditioning units or high-speed fans, which would have been dramatically more expensive to operate, no matter how efficiently they were made to function. During the winter, a blanket of cool air acted as a lid, keeping the warm air generated by the factory equipment down on the floor, where people needed the heat. (Without the breeze created by excessive air motion, anything about 68 degrees Fahrenheit felt plenty warm enough.) In other words, Kiser’s genius was to heat with cool air. Thermostats were placed near employees, not in the equipment up near the roof, in keeping with the idea of heating and cooling people as needed, not the building itself.

  Other benefits accrued. For example, in a conventional system, the opening and closing of truck docks constantly leaks in uncomfortably hot or cold air. A pressurized system keeps undesired air at bay rather than having to cool or heat it to restore the status quo. And excess heat generated by air compressors (which lose 80 percent of the energy they use as “waste” heat), welders, and other equipment could be easily captured and consolidated for use in the bigfoots. It turns what is generally a waste and a thermal liability into a working asset. If you combined such a system with a grass roof to insulate the structure and protect it from heat gain in the summer, wind l
oss in the winter, and the wear and tear of daylight, you’d be treating the building as an aerodynamic event, designing it like a machine—but this time, instead of a machine for living in, a machine that’s alive.

  Reap the Wind

  Wind power offers similar possibilities for hybrid systems that make more effective use of local resources. In places like Chicago, the “windy city” (where we are working with Mayor Richard Daley to help create “the greenest city in the United States”), and the Buffalo Ridge, which runs along the border of Minnesota and South Dakota and is sometimes referred to as the Saudi Arabia of wind, it’s not difficult to imagine what local source of potential energy is most abundant. We are already seeing multi-megawatt wind farms on the Buffalo Ridge, and the state of Minnesota has offered incentive programs for wind-farm development. The Pacific Northwest, too, now sees itself as a wind-power powerhouse, and new wind farms are springing up in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas. Europe has had aggressive wind-energy programs for years.

  From an eco-effective perspective, however, the design of conventional wind-power plants is not always optimal. The new wind farms are huge—as many as a hundred windmills (wind turbines, actually) grouped together, each of them a Goliath capable of producing one megawatt of electricity with a blade span the length of a football field. Developers like the centralized infrastructure, but the high-powered transmission lines they require means new giant towers marching over a once bucolic landscape, in addition to the windmills themselves. Also, modern windmills are not designed as technical nutrients with ecologically intelligent materials.

  Think back to those famous Dutch landscape paintings. The windmills were always located among the farms, a short distance from the fields, for convenient water pumping and milling. They were distributed across the land at a scale appropriate to it, and they were made from safe local materials—and looked beautiful to boot. Now imagine one of the new windmills distributed on every few family farms in the Great Plains. As with solar collectors, utilities could lease land from the farmers for this purpose, distributing the windmills and the power they generate in a way that optimizes existing power lines and requires few new ones. The farmers get much-needed supplemental income, and the utility gets to reap the power, which it adds to the grid. One of our projects for automotive energy conceives of wind power reaped in just this way; we call it “Ride the Wind.”

  Those who have difficulty imagining this becoming a major source of energy might consider what the tremendous industrial capacity that allows the United States to produce millions of automobiles per year might do if a fraction of it were applied in this direction. And with the new windmills already cost-effective and directly competitive with fossil-fuel-derived and nuclear energy in appropriate landscapes, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. Combined with intelligent applications of direct solar absorption and cost-effective conservation, the implications for national prosperity and security (thanks to sovereign sources of energy) are staggering. Just imagine the robust benefits of having a new wind-turbine industry that produces home-grown hydrogen for our pipelines and vehicles instead of being forced to rely on politically and physically fragile oil shipped in supertankers from halfway around the world.

  Transitional strategies for energy use give us the opportunity to develop technology that is truly eco-effective—not less depleting but replenishing. Ultimately, we want to be designing processes and products that not only return the biological and technical nutrients they use, but pay back with interest the energy they consume.

  Working with a team assembled by Professor David Orr of Oberlin College, we conceived the idea for a building and its site modeled on the way a tree works. We imagined ways that it could purify the air, create shade and habitat, enrich soil, and change with the seasons, eventually accruing more energy than it needs to operate. Features include solar panels on the roof; a grove of trees on the building’s north side for wind protection and diversity; an interior designed to change and adapt to people’s aesthetic and functional preferences with raised floors and leased carpeting; a pond that stores water for irrigation; a living machine inside and beside the building that uses a pond full of specially selected organisms and plants to clean the effluent; classrooms and large public rooms that face west and south to take advantage of solar gain; special windowpanes that control the amount of UV light entering the building; a restored forest on the east side of the building; and an approach to landscaping and grounds maintenance that obviates the need for pesticides or irrigation. These features are in the process of being optimized—in its first summer, the building began to generate more energy capital than it used—a small but hopeful start.

  Imagine a building like a tree, a city like a forest.

  A Diversity of Needs and Desires

  Respecting diversity in design means considering not only how a product is made but how it is to be used, and by whom. In a cradle-to-cradle conception, it may have many uses, and many users, over time and space. An office building or store, for example, might be designed so that it can be adapted to different uses over many generations of use, instead of built for one specific purpose and later torn down or awkwardly refitted. The SoHo and TriBeCa neighborhoods in lower Manhattan continue to thrive because their buildings were designed with several enduring advantages that today would not be considered efficient: they have high ceilings and large, high windows that let in daylight, thick walls that balance daytime heat with nighttime coolness. Because of their attractive and useful design, these buildings have gone through many cycles of use, as warehouses, showrooms, and workshops, then storage and distribution centers, then artists’ lofts, and, more recently, offices, galleries, and apartments. Their appeal and usefulness is enduringly apparent. Following this lead, we’ve designed some corporate buildings to be convertible to housing in the future.

  Like the French jam pots that could be used as drinking glasses once the jam was gone, packaging and products can be designed with their future upcycling in mind. Exterior packaging, with its premium on large, flat, stiff surfaces, is a natural precursor to a further life as building materials, as Henry Ford knew. A crate that is to be used to ship a product from Savannah could be made of waterproof insulation that recipients in Soweto would use in constructing houses. Again, cultural distinctions are part of the picture. African villagers who used to drink out of gourds or clay cups and have no recycling structure for “trash” might need a drink package that can be thrown onto the ground to decompose and provide food for nature. In India, where materials and energy are very expensive, people might welcome packaging that is safe to burn. In industrial areas, a better solution might be polymers designed as “food” for more bottles, with an appropriately designed upcycling infrastructure.

  In China, Styrofoam packaging presents such a disposal problem that people often refer to it as “white pollution.” It is thrown from the windows of trains and barges and litters the landscape everywhere. Imagine designing such packaging to safely biodegrade after use. It could be made from the empty rice stalks that are left in the fields after harvest, which are now usually burned. They are readily available and cheap. The packaging could be enriched with a small amount of nitrogen (potentially retrieved from automotive systems). Instead of feeling guilty and burdened when they are finished eating, people could enjoy throwing their safe, healthy nutripackage out the train window onto the ground, where it would quickly decompose and provide nitrogen to the soil. It could even contain seeds of indigenous plants that would take root as the packaging decomposes. Or people could wait to dispose of the packaging at the next train stop, where local farmers and gardeners would have set up stations to collect it for use in fertilizing crops. We could even plant signs that say “Please Litter.”

  Form Follows Evolution

  Instead of promoting a one-size-fits-all aesthetic, industries can design in the potential for “mass” customization, allowing packaging and products to be adapted to local tastes and traditions with
out compromising the integrity of the product. Luxury industries like fashion and cosmetics have been the trailblazers in allowing for customization to individual taste and local custom. Others can follow their lead, accommodating the need for individual and cultural expression in their designs. For example, the automobile industry might honor the Filipino practice of decorating vehicles, providing customers with the opportunity to attach fringe and to paint creative, outrageous designs in eco-friendly paints instead of constraining them to a “universal” look (or having them lose eco-effective benefits when they assert the cultural predilection for adornment). Eco-effective design demands a coherent set of principles based on nature’s laws and the opportunity for constant diversity of expression. It has been famously said that form follows function, but the possibilities are greater when form follows evolution.

  What goes for aesthetics goes for needs, which vary with ecological, economic, and cultural circumstances—not to mention individual preferences. As we have pointed out, soap as it is currently manufactured is designed to work the same way in every imaginable location and ecosystem. Faced with the questionable effects of such a design, eco-efficiency advocates might tell a manufacturer to “be less bad” by shipping concentrates instead of liquid soap, or by reducing or recycling packaging. But why try to optimize the wrong system? Why this packaging in the first place? Why these ingredients? Why a liquid? Why one-size-fits-all?