Cradle to Cradle Read online

  Nor is the reader’s pleasure and convenience an afterthought to environmentally responsible design. The pages are white and have a sensuous smoothness, and unlike recycled paper, they will not yellow with age. The ink won’t rub off on the reader’s fingers. Although its next life has already been imagined, this book is durable enough to last for many generations. It’s even waterproof, so you can read it at the beach, even in the hot tub. You’d buy it, carry it, and read it not as a badge of austerity—and not only for its content—but for its sheer tactile pleasure. It celebrates its materials rather than apologizing for them. Books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas. Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word.

  The assignment that leads to the design of this third book is to tell a story within the very molecules of its pages. Not the old tale of damage and despair, but one of abundance and renewal, human creativity and possibility. And although the book you hold in your hands is not yet that book, it is a step in that direction, a beginning to the story.

  We did not design the materials of this book. After years of analyzing and testing polymers to replace paper, we were delighted when designer Janine James happened to mention our search to Charlie Melcher of Melcher Media. Melcher was working with a paper adapted from a polymer blend that had been used to label detergent bottles, so that the labels could be recycled along with the bottles instead of being burned off. For “selfish” reasons, they wanted an alternative to the usual “monstrous hybrid.” Charlie was in search of a waterproof paper on which he could print books that could be read in the bath or at the beach. He knew its qualities extended beyond imperviousness to water and was eager to have us explore its eco-effective promise. When Michael tested it, he found that it off-gassed similarly to a conventional book. But it could be recycled, and more to the point, it has the potential to be upcycled: dissolved and remade as polymer of high quality and usefulness.

  Once we set about designing with such missions in mind—the short-term usefulness, convenience, and aesthetic pleasure of the product together with the ongoing life of its materials—the process of innovation begins in earnest. We leave aside the old model of product-and-waste, and its dour offspring, “efficiency,” and embrace the challenge of being not efficient but effective with respect to a rich mix of considerations and desires.

  Consider the Cherry Tree

  Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root, and grow. Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, “How inefficient and wasteful!” The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plants, animals, and soil. Although the tree actually makes more of its “product” than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure or, in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the tree’s fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.

  What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?

  We know what an eco-efficient building looks like. It is a big energy saver. It minimizes air infiltration by sealing places that might leak. (The windows do not open.) It lowers solar income with dark-tinted glass, diminishing the cooling load on the building’s air-conditioning system and thereby cutting the amount of fossil-fuel energy used. The power plant in turn releases a smaller amount of pollutants into the environment, and whoever foots the electric bill spends less money. The local utility honors the building as the most energy-saving in its area and holds it up as a model for environmentally conscious design. If all buildings were designed and built this way, it proclaims, businesses could do right by the environment and save money at the same time.

  Here’s how we imagine the cherry tree would do it: during the daytime, light pours in. Views of the outdoors through large, untinted windows are plentiful—each of the occupants has five views from wherever he or she happens to sit. Delicious, affordable food and beverages are available to employees in a café that opens onto a sun-filled courtyard. In the office space, each of them controls the flow of fresh air and the temperature of their personal breathing zones. The windows open. The cooling system maximizes natural airflows, as in a hacienda: at night, the system flushes the building with cool evening air, bringing the temperature down and clearing the rooms of stale air and toxins. A layer of native grasses covers the building’s roof, making it more attractive to songbirds and absorbing water runoff, while at the same time protecting the roof from thermal shock and ultraviolet degradation.

  In fact, this building is just as energy-efficient as the first, but that is a side effect of a broader and more complex design goal: to create a building that celebrates a range of cultural and natural pleasures—sun, light, air, nature, even food—in order to enhance the lives of the people who work there. During construction, certain elements of the second building did cost a little more. For example, windows that open are more expensive than windows that do not. But the nighttime cooling strategy cuts down on the need for air-conditioning during the day. Abundant daylight diminishes the need for fluorescent light. Fresh air makes the indoor spaces more pleasurable, a perk for current employees and a lure to potential ones—and thus an effect with economic as well as aesthetic consequences. (Securing and supporting a talented and productive workforce is one of a CFO’s primary goals, because the carrying cost of people—recruiting, employing, and retaining them—is a hundred times as great as the carrying cost of the average building.) In its every element, the building expresses the client’s and architects’ vision of a life-centered community and environment. We know, because Bill’s firm led the team that designed it.

  We brought the same sensibility to designing a factory for Herman Miller, the office-furniture manufacturer. We wanted to give workers the feeling that they’d spent the day outdoors, unlike workers in the conventional factory of the Industrial Revolution, who might not see daylight until the weekend. The offices and manufacturing space that we designed for Herman Miller were built for only 10 percent more money than it would have cost to erect a standard prefabricated metal factory building. We designed the factory around a tree-lined interior conceived as a brightly daylit “street” that ran the entire length of the building. There are rooftop skylights everywhere the workers are stationed, and the manufacturing space offers views of both the internal street and the outdoors, so that even as they work indoors, employees get to participate in the cycles of the day and the seasons. (Even the truck docks have windows.) The factory was designed to celebrate the local landscape and to invite indigenous species back to the site instead of scaring them away. Storm water and waste water are channeled through a series of connected wetlands that clean them, in the process lightening the load on the local river, which already suffers serious flooding because of runoff from roofs, parking lots, and other impervious surfaces.

  An analysis of the factory’s dramatic productivity gains has shown that one factor was “biophilia”—people’s love of the outdoors. Retention rates have been impressive. A number of workers who left for higher wages at a competitor’s factory returned in a few weeks. When asked why, they told the management they couldn’t work “in the dark.” They were young people who had entered the workforce only recently and had never worked in a “normal” factory before.

  These buildings represent only the beginnings of eco-effective design; they do not yet exemplify, in every way, the principles we espouse. But you might start to envision the difference between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness as the difference between an airless, fluorescent-lit gray cubicle and a sunlit area full of fresh air, natural views, and pleasa
nt places to work, eat, and converse.

  Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager’s job to “do things right.” It is an executive’s job to make sure “the right things” get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more “efficient.” Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things—on the right products and services and systems—instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them “right,” with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.

  If nature adhered to the human model of efficiency, there would be fewer cherry blossoms, and fewer nutrients. Fewer trees, less oxygen, and less clean water. Fewer songbirds. Less diversity, less creativity and delight. The idea of nature being more efficient, dematerializing, or even not “littering” (imagine zero waste or zero emissions for nature!) is preposterous. The marvelous thing about effective systems is that one wants more of them, not less.

  What Is Growth?

  Ask a child about growth, and she will probably tell you it is a good thing, a natural thing—it means getting bigger, healthier, and stronger. The growth of nature (and of children) is usually perceived as beautiful and healthy. Industrial growth, on the other hand, has been called into question by environmentalists and others concerned about the rapacious use of resources and the disintegration of culture and environment. Urban and industrial growth is often referred to as a cancer, a thing that grows for its own sake and not for the sake of the organism it inhabits. (As Edward Abbey wrote, “Growth for growth’s sake is a cancerous madness.”)

  Conflicting views of growth were a recurrent source of tension on President Clinton’s original Council on Sustainable Development, a group of twenty-five representatives of business, government, diverse social groups, and environmental organizations that met from 1993 to 1999. The commercial members’ belief that commerce is inherently required to perpetuate itself, that it must seek growth in order to fuel its continued existence, brought them to loggerheads with the environmentalists, to whom commercial growth meant more sprawl, more loss of ancient forests, wild places, and species, and more pollution, toxification, and global warming. Their desire for a no-growth scenario naturally frustrated the commercial players, for whom “no growth” could have only negative consequences. The perceived conflict between nature and industry made it look as if the values of one system must be sacrificed to the other.

  But unquestionably there are things we all want to grow, and things we don’t want to grow. We wish to grow education and not ignorance, health and not sickness, prosperity and not destitution, clean water and not poisoned water. We wish to improve the quality of life.

  The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world. Thus the “right things” for manufacturers and industrialists to do are those that lead to good growth—more niches, health, nourishment, diversity, intelligence, and abundance—for this generation of inhabitants on the planet and for generations to come.

  Let’s take a closer look at that cherry tree.

  As it grows, it seeks its own regenerative abundance. But this process is not single-purpose. In fact, the tree’s growth sets in motion a number of positive effects. It provides food for animals, insects, and microorganisms. It enriches the ecosystem, sequestering carbon, producing oxygen, cleaning air and water, and creating and stabilizing soil. Among its roots and branches and on its leaves, it harbors a diverse array of flora and fauna, all of which depend on it and on one another for the functions and flows that support life. And when the tree dies, it returns to the soil, releasing, as it decomposes, minerals that will fuel healthy new growth in the same place.

  The tree is not an isolated entity cut off from the systems around it: it is inextricably and productively engaged with them. This is a key difference between the growth of industrial systems as they now stand and the growth of nature.

  Consider a community of ants. As part of their daily activity, they:

  safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species

  grow and harvest their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are a part

  construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries, living quarters, and food-storage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled

  create disinfectants and medicines that are healthy, safe, and biodegradable

  maintain soil health for the entire planet.

  Individually we are much larger than ants, but collectively their biomass exceeds ours. Just as there is almost no corner of the globe untouched by human presence, there is almost no land habitat, from harsh desert to inner city, untouched by some species of ant. They are a good example of a population whose density and productiveness are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature. All their materials, even their most deadly chemical weapons, are biodegradable, and when they return to the soil, they supply nutrients, restoring in the process some of those that were taken to support the colony. Ants also recycle the wastes of other species; leaf-cutter ants, for example, collect decomposing matter from the Earth’s surface, carry it down into their colonies, and use it to feed the fungus gardens that they grow underground for food. During their movements and activities, they transport minerals to upper layers of soil, where plant life and fungi can use them as nutrients. They turn and aerate the soil and make passageways for water drainage, playing a vital role in maintaining soil fecundity and health. They truly are, as biologist E. O. Wilson has pointed out, the little things that run the world. But although they may run the world, they do not overrun it. Like the cherry tree, they make the world a better place.

  Some people use the term nature’s services to refer to the processes by which, without human help, water and air are purified; erosion, floods, and drought are mitigated; materials are detoxified and decomposed; soil is created and its fertility renewed; ecological equilibrium and diversity are maintained; climate is stabilized; and, not least, aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction is provided to us. We don’t like this focus on services, since nature does not do any of these things just to serve people. But it is useful to think of these processes as part of a dynamic interdependence, in which many different organisms and systems support one another in multiple ways. The consequences of growth—increases in insects, microorganisms, birds, water cycling, and nutrient flows—tend toward the positive kind that enrich the vitality of the whole ecosystem. The consequences of a new strip mall, on the other hand, while they may have some immediate local benefits (jobs, more money circulating through the local economy) and may even boost the country’s overall GDP, are gained at the expense of a decline in overall quality of life—increased traffic, asphalt, pollution, and waste—that ultimately undermines even some of the mall’s ostensible benefits.

  Typically, conventional manufacturing operations have predominantly negative side effects. In a textile factory, for example, water may come in clean, but it goes out contaminated with fabric dyes, which usually contain toxins such as cobalt, zirconium, other heavy metals, and finishing chemicals. Solid wastes from fabric trimmings and loom clippings present another problem, as much of the material used for textiles is petrochemical-based. Effluents and sludge from production processes cannot be safely deposited into ecosystems, so they are often buried or burned as hazardous waste. The fabric itself is sold all over the world, used, then thrown “away”—which usually means it is either incinerated, releasing toxins, or placed in a landfill. Even in the rather short life span of the fabric, its particles have abraded into the air and been taken into people’s lungs. All this in the name of efficient
production.

  Just about every process has side effects. But they can be deliberate and sustaining instead of unintended and pernicious. We can be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of nature’s activity, and we can also be inspired by it to design some positive side effects to our own enterprises instead of focusing exclusively on a single end.

  Eco-effective designers expand their vision from the primary purpose of a product or system and consider the whole. What are its goals and potential effects, both immediate and wide-ranging, with respect to both time and place? What is the entire system—cultural, commercial, ecological—of which this made thing, and way of making things, will be a part?

  Once upon a Roof

  Once you begin to consider the larger picture, the most familiar features of human fabrication begin to shape-shift. An ordinary roof is a good example. Conventional roofing surfaces are infamously among the most expensive parts of a building to maintain: baking under the sun all day, they are exposed to relentless ultraviolet degradation, and dramatic variations between daytime and nighttime temperatures subject them to constant thermal shock. But in the larger context, they reveal themselves as part of the growing landscape of impervious surfaces (along with paved roads, parking lots, sidewalks, and buildings themselves) that contribute to flooding, heat up cities in the summertime (dark surfaces absorb and re-emit solar energy), and deplete habitat for many species.

  If we viewed these effects piecemeal, we might attempt to address the flooding problem by calling for regulations requiring big retention ponds for storm water. We’d “solve” the heat problem by providing additional air-conditioning units to buildings in the area, doing our best to ignore the fact that the new units would contribute to the higher ambient temperatures that made them necessary in the first place. As for shrinking habitat, well, we’d likely throw up our hands. Isn’t wildlife an inevitable casualty of urban growth?