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  Nor are these criteria the only conceivable ones. High on our own lists is fun: Is the product a pleasure, not only to use but to discard? Once, in a conversation with Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, Bill observed that the elements we add to the basic business criteria of cost, performance, and aesthetics—ecological intelligence, justice, and fun—correspond to Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yes, Dell responded, but noted we had left out a most important consideration: bandwidth.)

  An Industrial Re-Evolution

  Design that deeply respects diversity on all the levels we have discussed brings about a process of industrial re-evolution. Our products and processes can be most deeply effective when they are resonant with information and responses—when they most resemble the living world. Inventive machines that use the mechanisms of nature instead of harsh chemicals, concrete, or steel are a step in the right direction, but they are still machines—still a way of using technology (albeit benign technology) to harness nature to human purposes. The same could be said of our increasing use of cybertechnology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to replace the functions of chemicals and brute force. The new technologies do not in themselves create industrial revolutions; unless we change their context, they are simply hyperefficient engines driving the steamship of the first Industrial Revolution to new extremes.

  Even today, most cutting-edge environmental approaches are still based on the idea that human beings are inevitably destructive toward nature and must be curbed and contained. Even the idea of “natural capital” characterizes nature as a tool to be used for our benefit. This approach might have been valid two hundred years ago, when our species was developing its industrial systems, but now it cries out for rethinking. Otherwise, we are limited to efforts to slow the destruction of the natural world while we sustain the current industrial system of production and consumption for a few hundred years more. With human ingenuity and technological advances, we might even be able to create sustaining systems for our own species beyond that, after the natural world has greatly declined. But how exciting is sustainability? If a man characterized his relationship with his wife as sustainable, you might well pity them both.

  Natural systems take from their environment, but they also give something back. The cherry tree drops its blossoms and leaves while it cycles water and makes oxygen; the ant community redistributes the nutrients throughout the soil. We can follow their cue to create a more inspiring engagement—a partnership—with nature. We can build factories whose products and by-products nourish the ecosystem with biodegradable material and recirculate technical materials instead of dumping, burning, or burying them. We can design systems that regulate themselves. Instead of using nature as a mere tool for human purposes, we can strive to become tools of nature who serve its agenda too. We can celebrate the fecundity in the world, instead of perpetuating a way of thinking and making that eliminates it. And there can be many of us and the things we make, because we have the right system—a creative, prosperous, intelligent, and fertile system—and, like the ants, we will be “effective.”

  Chapter Six

  Putting Eco-Effectiveness into Practice

  IN MAY 1999, William Clay Ford, Jr., chairman of Ford Motor Company and great-grandson of its founder, Henry Ford, made a dramatic announcement: Ford’s massive River Rouge factory in Dearborn, Michigan, an icon of the first Industrial Revolution, would undergo a $2 billion makeover to transform it into an icon of the next.

  Henry Ford had bought the property when it was a marsh, and by the mid-1920s the plant began producing cars. In the following decades the River Rouge manufacturing plant grew to become one of the largest industrial complexes on the planet, fulfilling Ford’s vision of a sprawling, vertically integrated facility capable of producing an automobile from start to finish. Coal, iron ore, rubber, and sand were brought in on barges from the Great Lakes. Blast furnaces, smelters, and rolling and stamping mills worked around the clock to produce the necessary materials. Working with Albert Kahn, his architect, Ford oversaw the design of powerhouses, body shops, assembly buildings, tool and die shops, an array of stockpiles, warehouses, factories, and associated infrastructure.

  “The Rouge” was heralded as a marvel of manufacturing engineering and scale, and an emblem of modern industry. During the Depression, the factory even took on the job of taking apart used cars. A “disassembly line” was set up, with workers stripping each car of radiators, glass, tires, and upholstery as it moved down the line, until the steel body and chassis were dropped into an enormous baler. Admittedly the process was primitive and driven by brute force more than sophisticated design, but it was a striking illustration of “waste equals food” and an early step toward the reuse of industrial materials. Eventually the Rouge covered hundreds of acres and employed more than one hundred thousand people. It was a popular tourist destination and an inspiration to artists. In his photographs and paintings of the Rouge, Charles Sheeler portrayed the essence of a rational American manufacturing system. Painter Diego Rivera immortalized the factory from a worker’s perspective in his astonishing murals installed at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

  By the end of the century, the facilities were showing their age. Although Ford’s Mustang was still made there, the ranks of employees had dwindled to under seven thousand through divestiture, automation, and reduced integration. Over the years the plant’s infrastructure had deteriorated. Its technology was outdated—the car plant, for example, was originally constructed in keeping with an assembly method in which parts were dropped down from floor to floor and assembled in a completed car on the bottom floor. Decades’ worth of manufacturing processes had taken a toll on the soil and water. Major parts of the site had become brownfield—abandoned industrial land.

  Ford Motor Company easily could have decided to do as their competitors had done—to close down the site, put a fence around it, and erect a new plant in a site where land was clean, cheap, and easily developed. Instead, it was committed to keeping a manufacturing operation going at the Rouge. In 1999 William Clay Ford, Jr., in his new post as chairman, took the commitment a step further. He looked at the rusting pipes and mounds of debris and took on the challenge (and the responsibility) of restoring it to a living environment. Instead of leaving the old mess and starting afresh somewhere else (moving on “like a pack of locusts,” as one employee put it), Ford decided to help his company become native to its place.

  Soon after becoming chairman, Ford had met with Bill to explore eco-effective thinking. A short meeting became an afternoon of exciting discussion, at the end of which Ford took Bill to his new office under construction on the twelfth floor, overlooking the Rouge in the distance. Did Bill think they could apply the principles they’d been discussing to that place—to go beyond recycling and “efficiency” to something truly new and inspiring? In May, Ford publicly asked Bill to lead the redesign of the River Rouge, from the ground up.

  The first step was to create a “Rouge Room” in the basement of the company’s headquarters, where the design team—which included representatives of all sectors of the company, along with outsiders like chemists, toxicologists, biologists, regulatory specialists, and union representatives—could come together. Their primary agenda was to create a set of goals, strategies, and ways of measuring progress, but they also just needed a setting that rendered visible their thinking process and encouraged them to raise the difficult questions. The walls were covered with working documents positioned under giant labels so that anyone walking through could see what was being considered in the way of socially, economically, and ecologically informed standards to measure the quality of air, habitat, community, energy use, employee relations, architecture, and, not least of all, production. Hundreds of employees came to the Rouge Room (jokingly referred to as a “peace room,” as opposed to a “war room”) during the process for structured meetings or simply to meet (often for other purposes) in a place suffused with so many o
f Ford’s newly articulated intentions.

  The company’s commitment to financial security had been forged in the fire. Henry Ford had narrowly skirted bankruptcy during World War II, and seriously struggled to get the company back on its feet. Ever since then the bottom line has been a solid focus for everything the company does—every innovation must be good for profits. But the team had complete freedom to explore innovative ways of creating shareholder value, and the company’s conventional decision-making process was to be informed by all aspects of the fractal tool we discussed in Chapter Five.

  Once Bill Ford opened the door to the new thinking, hundreds of employees across all sectors of the company—in manufacturing, supply-chain management, purchasing, finance, design, environmental quality, regulatory compliance, and research and development (not only at River Rouge) began to come forward with ideas. There was internal resistance to overcome, to be sure, an entrenched skepticism that saw environmental strategies as at best extraneous to economics, and at worst as inherently uneconomic. One engineer burst into an early meeting saying, “I’m not here to talk to no eco-architect about no eco-architecture. I hear you want to put skylights all over the factory, and here at Ford we tar over skylights. And I hear you want to put grass on the roof. Now why am I here?” (He later turned out to be a hero of the project.) Also, as one scientific innovator within the company put it, the established scientific element at the company could be “like a fortress with a big moat.” But, he added, “If there were no struggle around this, then by definition it would not have been very important.”

  Ford was already unique among automobile manufacturers in that, under then-director of environmental quality Tim O’Brien (and with Bill Ford’s influence in his former role as a member of the environment committee), all of its plants had International Standards of Organization (ISO) environmental certifications that reflected their ability not only to monitor the quality of what they produced by standard metrics, but their environmental performance as well. The company had taken the additional step of requesting its suppliers to have the same. The ISO certification dictated that the company undertake a proactive investigation of environmental interests and concerns rather than relying on regulators to moderate it.

  As Tim O’Brien himself pointed out, most manufacturers with old sites like the Rouge take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach, preferring not to examine their surroundings too carefully because any problem they discover will incur some obligation to act (and some vulnerability to lawsuits). When they do discover (or are forced to acknowledge) contamination, they usually remove the contaminated soil and bury it in a safe place, in compliance with EPA regulations. Such “scrape and bake” strategies may be efficient, but they are expensive and simply relocate the problems along with the topsoil.

  Ford’s design team said, “Let’s assume the worst.” When it found that there was indeed contamination at several of its plant sites, Ford negotiated with the government to experiment with treating its soil in a new way. It would remove and bury only the top layer of soil, then clean the deeper layers. It has been exploring innovative cleanup methods such as phytoremediation, a process that uses green plants to remove toxins from soil, and mycoremediation, or cleaning soil with mushrooms and fungi. From Rouge Room conception to implementation on the site, the approach is framed in positive, proactive terms—not “clean up” but “create healthy soil,” for example. The phytoremediating plants are chosen for their indigenous as well as their toxin-cleansing properties. The health of the site is measured not in terms of meeting minimum government-imposed standards but with respect to things like the number of earthworms per cubic foot of soil, the diversity of birds and insects on the land and of aquatic species in a nearby river, and the attractiveness of the site to local residents. The work is governed by a compelling goal: creating a factory site where Ford employees’ own children could safely play.

  As the company looked at its new sustainability manufacturing agenda, it found more and more opportunities to improve environmental performance without conflicting with financial objectives, and these successes justified taking on more ambitious environmental challenges. Storm-water management and quality was a good start, because it is often taken for granted and appears to be inexpensive. But Ford discovered that storm-water management could be very expensive; regulations emerging from the Clean Water Act required new concrete pipes and treatment plants, threatening to cost the company up to $48 million. Instead, when the new plant is finished, it will have a green roof capable of holding two inches of rainwater, and porous parking lots that can also absorb and store water. Then the storm water will seep into a constructed marsh for purification by the plants, microbes, fungi, and other biota that live there. From the marsh the water will travel through swales—ditches full of native plants—on to the river, clear and clean. The storm water will take three days to seep to the river instead of heading there at once in a fierce, messy washout requiring quick, drastic measures. Instead of simply being a huge invisible liability, storm-water management is treated as a visible and enjoyable asset. The eco-effective approach cleans the water and the air, provides habitat, and enhances the beauty of the landscape while it saves the company a great deal of money—as much as $35 million by one estimation.

  The redesign of the manufacturing facility embodies the company’s commitment to social equity as well as to ecology and the economic bottom line. The old factory had become dark, dank, and unpleasant. Workers would keep one pair of shoes for use in the plant and one for street wear. In winter they might not see the sun for weeks, except on weekends. The company appreciates the fact that an enjoyable place to work is key to attracting a creative, diverse, and productive workforce. After visiting the Herman Miller factory Bill’s architectural practice had designed in Michigan, the Ford team needed no more convincing: the new facility would be daylit—even the cafeteria, so that workers could get to daylight even on a short break—as Henry Ford’s original factories had been, in an age of less energetic electrical systems. It would have high ceilings, plenty of unobstructed views, and (as a safety measure) supervisors’ offices and team work rooms on a mezzanine to reduce the risk of accidents. The team also adopted Tom Kiser’s way of viewing the building as a giant duct—and focusing on heating and cooling the people in the building rather than the building itself (see Chapter Five).

  Ford sees River Rouge as a laboratory where it can test ideas it hopes will translate into a new way of designing for manufacture worldwide. Considering, for example, that the company alone owns approximately 200 million square feet of roofing around the world, successful innovations could be quickly implemented at industry-transforming scale. The specific solutions must grow out of and respond to local circumstances, however. A green roof might work in St. Petersburg, Florida, but not in St. Petersburg, Russia. Already the work at River Rouge has led to a review of other Ford plants where windmills and solar collectors could make economic sense if they are conceived as products of service within a total energy package. The company’s overarching decision is to become native to each place. From that decision, local solutions follow, are adopted and adapted elsewhere as appropriate, and are continually revised and refined, effecting a profound process of change that may ultimately embrace every aspect of what a company makes and how it is produced, marketed, sold, and cycled on. A redesigned automobile factory may ultimately result in an entirely new notion of what an automobile is. It will take time to transform an industry so large, with such a complex infrastructure, but perhaps we will live to see a new automobile disassembly plant at the site of the first modern assembly plant.

  Five Steps to Eco-Effectiveness

  How does a company like Ford—with its long and distinguished history, its vast infrastructure, its large numbers of employees used to certain ways of doing things—begin to remake itself? It is not possible (nor would it necessarily be desirable) to simply sweep away long-established methods of working, designing, and decision-
making. For the engineer who has always taken—indeed, has been trained his or her entire life to take—a traditional, linear, cradle-to-grave approach, focusing on one-size-fits-all tools and systems, and who expects to use materials and chemicals and energy as he or she has always done, the shift to new models and more diverse input can be unsettling. In the face of immediate deadlines and demands, such changes can seem messy, burdensome, and threatening, even overwhelming. But as Albert Einstein observed, if we are to solve the problems that plague us, our thinking must evolve beyond the level we were using when we created those problems in the first place.

  Fortunately for human nature, in most cases change begins with a specific product, system, or problem and, driven by a commitment to putting eco-effective principles into action, grows incrementally. In our work, we have observed companies of all sizes, types, and cultures in this thrilling process of transition, and we have had ample opportunity to witness the steps they go through as they begin to retool their thinking and their actions in service to an eco-effective vision.

  Step 1. Get “free of” known culprits.

  Beginning to turn away from substances that are widely recognized as harmful is the step most individuals and industries take first as they move toward eco-effectiveness. We are so accustomed to hearing products touted as “phosphate free,” “lead free,” and “fragrance free” that the approach seems natural to us. Yet think how curious a practice it is. Imagine, for example, how your guests would react if, instead of describing the old family recipe you’d lovingly prepared, and the tasty ingredients you’d gone to such lengths to gather, you announced proudly that dinner would be “arsenic free.”