Cradle to Cradle Read online

  Cradle to Cradle is like good gardening; it is not about “saving” the planet but about learning to thrive on it. I want to turn the nail-biters out there into people who can see that we can’t rebuild our environment if we are fretting, that we cannot move forwards if we merely “blame and shame” ourselves and others. We need a spirit of cooperation among ourselves, but like gardeners we need more cooperation with nature—and more insights into its specific rationales.

  When you talk about “saving the planet” you turn it into an ethical question, and I think you won’t solve problems if they are seen as “ethical”. At some point, everybody behaves badly: it wasn’t just the Nazis who forgot about ethics. Under stress or in a state of insecurity, in a traffic jam or when you are hungry, we all make regrettable mistakes. Bill and I want to put questions like the greenhouse effect on the practical level of “let’s not be stupid” rather than “be ethical”. It is irrelevant whether you are a scientist or an informed citizen—if you don’t want to be an idiot your instinct is to do what you can to combat the greenhouse effect. Don’t make it an ethical problem; make it a quality-of-life problem. Whatever you do, look at the quality of what you do. When we make it an ethical problem, we will not solve it.

  I especially try to work with young scientists who want to be proud of their work when they develop new products. But, as I said before, most of the new products on the market are optimizing the wrong materials. Take, for instance, the EU banning asbestos from brake pads. Companies like Volkswagen and Ford advertize their products as free from asbestos, but nobody asks what is used instead. Instead they are using antimony sulphide, Sb2S3, which is an even stronger carcinogen than asbestos. In fact, if you want to protect the environment buy a Porsche which has ceramic brakepads (and buy the black one – the green is far more toxic).

  It is the same with the manufacture of television sets when banning two heavy metals—lead and cadmium. Nobody asks what is put in place of lead. When you replace lead as a soldering material for circuit boards, the replacements are tin, silver, copper, nickel, and bismuth. All of these elements are rare and/or toxic. The “replacement” is a distraction, not a solution, and it introduces new problems. I told an EU committee that I would not fly in a plane without lead in its circuitry—and now aircraft are exempt from the EU order. I keep pressing the same argument: that lead can be a good constituent, as it can be used within Cradle to Cradle programs: we can re-employ it endlessly and never in the process more than infinitesimally pollute water supplies. Lead is a perfect technical nutrient and now it has been demonized.

  What does it help to ban one of 4,360 different chemicals in your television set if you are replacing one toxic material with another, and perhaps worsen the set’s performance? Sometimes you worsen the environment as well. You can replace lead with bismuth, but in nature you can only extract a ton of bismuth with ten tons of lead ore—and then you have all that EU-rejected lead to put in leaded gasoline for African countries, which is what all the European petroleum countries are selling there. You generate a cheap market for lead in other places by making a lead-free, pro-bismuth market in the EU.

  Perhaps we should look at a full picture of our resources, and especially heavy metals, in the same way we look at other environmental assets. The United Nations says that within a short space of time we have lost more than half our monkeys, and seventy percent of our dolphins and swordfish. If we translate that into resource losses from minerals and materials, would people care as much? The joke (if you have heard it before it may be because it is our favorite joke) is that when one planet meets another planet, Planet 1 says to Planet 2, “Hey you look terrible.” Planet 2 says, “Yes, I know. I have Homo sapiens.” Planet 1 says, “Don’t worry. I had that too and it will soon disappear.” This echoes what I said before—should we believe that this would be a better planet if we weren’t on it? Is there a “cure”?

  The only chapter of this book which I have reconsidered since 2002 is the fifth one, “Respect Diversity”. “Respecting” is far too weak. Diversity will disappear unless we actively support it. This goes back to my argument with minimalizing and not pulling our environmental solutions closer to our chests like blankets. Diversity, in the face of standardizations and other kinds of convenience, has become something we pay lip service to. Instead, one size fits all things. To say that you respect indigenous people, or the minerals in a particular beach sand, or even human hair in all its chemical varieties—that does not get you anywhere. The variety needs support, and scientific support for what is particular and precious—not just “respect”.

  Cradle to Cradle is less about pressing towards a goal than following a compass. Yes, you can make cheap electronic products without lead and the lead can be used somewhere else. What does this achieve? Can’t we look after lead in perpetuity, the way we should look after fresh water forever? Please don’t romanticize the problem, or connect it to a bad conscience, or legislate in ways that make the solutions harder. It is not that we are “so bad” or that the science of Cradle to Cradle is too hard or impossible. It needs people who can think across many of the stalemates.

  There is a new project of mine—I am writing in 2008—which is relatively small but it says something about Cradle to Cradle approaches. There is a wetland called Rijnenburg in the province of Utrecht. Bogs actually are better at soaking up carbon dioxide than fully grown forests, and at Rijnenburg there are plans for a new housing development which must be built protecting both this natural resource and the local species. The area is designed so that each neighborhood focuses on at least two Cradle to Cradle goals. With earlier environmental benchmarks, this would be easy—but Cradle to Cradle introduces higher ambitions and, I hope, exemplary living conditions. Bill McDonough hopes that something similar may happen with the Make It Project in New Orleans.

  We don’t underestimate how difficult you may find working to Cradle to Cradle standards, but we also don’t underestimate the enthusiasm out there that wants them to work. Bill McDonough and I were among Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” in 2007, and popular acclaim for the concept is never the problem. The problem is to explain the possible solutions to that public, and that was why we initially published Cradle to Cradle on plastic pages for the American edition. Shall I now try to justify this?

  An American uses about 400 kilograms of paper a year, and if the global community used just 200 kilograms per person there would be no trees left. Clearly, it is up to us to do something, not just ask individuals to reduce their own paper consumption. Printing a book on plastic as we did was a stupid idea, but I wanted to show readers that it works, even though it is not profitable if the book you buy is one you want to keep forever. It does, however, make sense for the newspapers and magazines which you read and can return to your newsagent. The Silicon Valley Technical Institute picked up the idea and now synthetic “paper” is becoming common. You can wash off the inks and reuse the page. We are negotiating with several newspapers about the technology.

  The 2002 American edition on plastic pages was a demonstration, but all other editions of Cradle to Cradle, apart from the Hungarian, were like this one, published on paper. The bathtime plastic was an interesting prototype and neither good nor less bad, but it was something to think about. Between 2002 and 2008, Cradle to Cradle sold nearly 300,000 copies to English readers across the markets. In fact, all the editions of the book have sold well (in seven translations to date). It has sold so well in China that I joke about being the second-best-selling German author there, after Karl Marx.

  In the face of environmental crises, I do not stand here like that English king Canute, who thought if he shouted he could turn back the tide. I see the tide, you see it, and perhaps our solution is to learn to surf. Other problems with our environment are bigger than I understood when, years ago, we suggested Cradle to Cradle as a particularly important key to the solution. But the emphasis remains important. It’s not just about “saving” this planet, b
ut about learning how to live on it. It is not that the conservation of monkeys needs us less, but the conservation of minerals needs us too.

  . . . While, from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind; But more advanced, behold, with strange surprise, New distant scenes of endless science rise!

  Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism”

  Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain, value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.

  Albert Einstein

  Michael Braungart, Hamburg 2008

  Chapter One

  A Question of Design

  IN THE SPRING of 1912, one of the largest moving objects ever created by human beings left Southampton, England, and began gliding toward New York. It appeared to be the epitome of its industrial age—a potent representation of technology, prosperity, luxury, and progress. It weighed 66,000 tons. Its steel hull stretched the length of four city blocks. Each of its steam engines was the size of a town house. And it was headed for a disastrous encounter with the natural world.

  This vessel, of course, was the Titanic, a brute of a ship, seemingly impervious to the forces of the natural world. In the minds of the captain, the crew, and many of the passengers, nothing could sink it.

  One might say that the Titanic was not only a product of the Industrial Revolution but remains an apt metaphor for the industrial infrastructure that revolution created. Like that famous ship, this infrastructure is powered by brutish and artificial sources of energy that are environmentally depleting. It pours waste into the water and smoke into the sky. It attempts to work by its own rules, which are contrary to those of nature. And although it may seem invincible, the fundamental flaws in its design presage tragedy and disaster.

  A Brief History of the Industrial Revolution

  Imagine that you have been given the assignment of designing the Industrial Revolution—retrospectively. With respect to its negative consequences, the assignment would have to read something like this:

  Design a system of production that

  puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year

  produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations

  results in gigantic amounts of waste

  puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved

  requires thousands of complex regulations—not to keep people and natural systems safe, but rather to keep them from being poisoned too quickly

  measures productivity by how few people are working

  creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them

  erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices.

  Of course, the industrialists, engineers, inventors, and other minds behind the Industrial Revolution never intended such consequences. In fact, the Industrial Revolution as a whole was not really designed. It took shape gradually, as industrialists, engineers, and designers tried to solve problems and to take immediate advantage of what they considered to be opportunities in an unprecedented period of massive and rapid change.

  It began with textiles in England, where agriculture had been the main occupation for centuries. Peasants farmed, the manor and town guilds provided food and goods, and industry consisted of craftspeople working individually as a side venture to farming. Within a few decades, this cottage industry, dependent on the craft of individual laborers for the production of small quantities of woolen cloth, was transformed into a mechanized factory system that churned out fabric—much of it now cotton instead of wool—by the mile.

  This change was spurred by a quick succession of new technologies. In the mid-1700s cottage workers spun thread on spinning wheels in their homes, working the pedals with their hands and feet to make one thread at a time. The spinning jenny, patented in 1770, increased the number of threads from one to eight, then sixteen, then more. Later models would spin as many as eighty threads simultaneously. Other mechanized equipment, such as the water frame and the spinning mule, increased production levels at such a pace, it must have seemed something like Moore’s Law (named for Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel), in which the processing speed of computer chips roughly doubles every eighteen months.

  In preindustrial times, exported fabrics would travel by canal or sailing ships, which were slow and unreliable in poor weather, weighted with high duties and strict laws, and vulnerable to piracy. In fact, it was a wonder the cargo got to its destination at all. The railroad and the steamship allowed products to be moved more quickly and farther. By 1840 factories that had once made a thousand articles a week had the means and motivation to produce a thousand articles a day. Fabric workers grew too busy to farm and moved into towns to be closer to factories, where they and their families might work twelve or more hours a day. Urban areas spread, goods proliferated, and city populations increased. More, more, more—jobs, people, products, factories, businesses, markets—seemed to be the rule of the day.

  Like all paradigm shifts, this one encountered resistance. Cottage workers afraid of losing work and Luddites (followers of Ned Ludd)—experienced cloth makers angry about the new machines and the unapprenticed workers who operated them—smashed labor-saving equipment and made life difficult for inventors, some of whom died outcast and penniless before they could profit from their new machines. Resistance touched not simply on technology but on spiritual and imaginative life. The Romantic poets articulated the growing difference between the rural, natural landscape and that of the city—often in despairing terms: “Citys . . . are nothing less than over grown prisons that shut out the world and all its beauties,” wrote the poet John Clare. Artists and aesthetes like John Ruskin and William Morris feared for a civilization whose aesthetic sensibility and physical structures were being reshaped by materialistic designs.

  There were other, more lasting problems. Victorian London was notorious for having been “the great and dirty city,” as Charles Dickens called it, and its unhealthy environment and suffering underclasses became hallmarks of the burgeoning industrial city. London air was so grimy from airborne pollutants, especially emissions from burning coal, that people would change their cuffs and collars at the end of the day (behavior that would be repeated in Chattanooga during the 1960s, and even today in Beijing or Manila). In early factories and other industrial operations, such as mining, materials were considered expensive, but people were often considered cheap. Children as well as adults worked for long hours in deplorable conditions.

  But the general spirit of early industrialists—and of many others at the time—was one of great optimism and faith in the progress of humankind. As industrialization boomed, other institutions emerged that assisted its rise: commercial banks, stock exchanges, and the commercial press all opened further employment opportunities for the new middle class and tightened the social network around economic growth. Cheaper products, public transportation, water distribution and sanitation, waste collection, laundries, safe housing, and other conveniences gave people, both rich and poor, what appeared to be a more equitable standard of living. No longer did the leisure classes alone have access to all the comforts.

  The Industrial Revolution was not planned, but it was not without a motive. At bottom it was an economic revolution, driven by the desire for the acquisition of capital. Industrialists wanted to make products as efficiently as possible and to get the greatest volume of goods to the largest number of people. In most industries, this meant shifting from a system of manual labor to one of efficient mechanization.

  Consider cars. In the early 1890s the automobile (of European origin) was made to meet a customer’s specifications by craftspeople who were usually independent contractors. For example, a machine-tool company in Paris, which happened to be the leading manufacturer of cars at the time, produced only several hundred a year. They were luxury items, built slowly and carefu
lly by hand. There was no standard system of measuring and gauging parts, and no way to cut hard steel, so parts were created by different contractors, hardened under heat (which often altered dimensions), and individually filed down to fit the hundreds of other parts in the car. No two were alike, nor could they be.

  Henry Ford worked as an engineer, a machinist, and a builder of race cars (which he himself raced) before founding the Ford Motor Company in 1903. After producing a number of early vehicles, Ford realized that to make cars for the modern American worker—not just for the wealthy—he would need to manufacture vehicles cheaply and in great quantities. In 1908 his company began producing the legendary Model T, the “car for the great multitude” that Ford had dreamed of, “constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise . . . so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”

  In the following years, several aspects of manufacturing meshed to achieve this goal, revolutionizing car production and rapidly increasing levels of efficiency. First, centralization: in 1909 Ford announced that the company would produce only Model T’s and in 1910 moved to a much larger factory that would use electricity for its power and gather a number of production processes under one roof. The most famous of Ford’s innovations is the moving assembly line. In early production, the engines, frames, and bodies of the cars were assembled separately, then brought together for final assembly by a group of workmen. Ford’s innovation was to bring “the materials to the man,” instead of “the man to the materials.” He and his engineers developed a moving assembly line based on the ones used in the Chicago beef industry: it carried materials to workers and, at its most efficient, enabled each of them to repeat a single operation as the vehicle moved down the line, reducing overall labor time dramatically.