September, 2008
“What if buildings actually created an abundance of fresh water, fresh air and power? What if it was possible to take your chair or carpet, cut it up small and eat it with your muesli?” When Professor Dr. Michael Braungart started saying things like this at the recent Better by Design CEO Summit jaws were dropping so fast you could almost hear them drum-rolling on the floor. But what does he mean?
Michael Braungart is the principal of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, Professor of Process Engineering at Universität Lüneburg (Germany), and co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things with architect William McDonough. But more than that, he is that rare thing – a visionary who understands the details of his subject and maintains a sense of humour.
Michael’s work as an environmental chemist set him on a collision course with many of the materials of modern home design. As a former director of Greenpeace’s chemistry department he uncovered the fact that, as he describes it:
“Most of the materials in furniture, paints and more were never designed to go inside, which means the air quality in most modern buildings is worse than the most polluted city street. Most skin care products were never designed to go on anybody’s skin and most children’s toys should not be played with by children.”
The Cradle to Cradle is a bid to transform these products and more. It also takes us beyond the cradle to grave approach, where our industrial system is still largely based on digging natural resources up, turning them into short-lived poorly designed things, using them, and then burying them in a hole.
It goes beyond reducing or even eliminating waste and pollution. It eliminates the very concepts of waste and pollution. It’s about industrial production and products where the side effects are positive rather than negative. Carpets and chair made of such positive materials that they can be composted (or even eaten!) at the end of their use, factories that produce cheap power or soil as by-products.
And it’s not necessarily about efficiency, it’s about effectiveness. Michael points out that at the moment the industrialised nations are very efficiently destroying the environment, while Mozart, Van Gogh, love and sex are not particularly efficient, but are extremely effective.
Michael believes that what most people consider ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’ today is largely a form of guilt management for the damage we feel we have done to the world. While justifiable, it is far too limited, too negative, and stifles innovation.
This means that recycling, for example tends to be: “Doing things less badly, instead of not doing bad things. It’s like perfecting something which is wrong in the first place, so you are now just being perfectly wrong.”
It turns away from the self-flagellating obsession with just leaving things out, minimising waste, minimising ourselves, or feeling guilty for simply being on the planet.
Michael argues that this guilt at simply being human, the sense that there are just too many of us, is also partly to blame for the mindset which allows the industrialised world to abandon starving people in Africa and elsewhere. If you begin to believe that humanity itself has no real right to be on the planet, how can you believe in human rights?
One of the greatest enemies of genuine development at the moment is what Michael describes as a particularly European fascination for ‘doing as if,’ or acting like you are doing something, rather than actually doing it. For example publicising the banning of one toxic substance while failing to tell people that it has been replaced with something equally or more harmful.
He is also only too happy to slaughter a few of the environmental movement’s sacred cows. “I don’t want to minimise my footprint,” he says triumphantly. “I want a massive footprint, but I want it to be a positive one. Yes we only have one planet, but if we are clever we can use it to produce 50 times what we have now, so it’s as if we have 50 planets. There are not too many of us, we are just being too stupid.”
It is a positive vision. It contains the idea that there is no longer the bit of the planet we are responsible for, and then wilderness. We are affecting all of it, so we are responsible for all of it – this human managed Earth. The response is not a retreat from globalisation, capitalism or democracy but a challenge to reinvigorate them, to take on our responsibility.
Instead of making the same old things and trying to minimise their harm by what Michael terms ‘downcycling’ them into lower value items, we should create truly positive products in the first place. These should exist in one of two closed loops of production and re-production.
One is the nutrient cycle, in which everything should be edible, compostable or biodegradable. The other is the technical cycle, in which materials which cannot do these things, for example the precious heavy metals we use for computers and mobile phones, can be easily reclaimed and re-used.
“When you go to buy a product, you should ask yourself, when I am finished with this, can I eat it, burn it safely and cleanly in my fireplace, compost it in the garden, or will the company take it back?” he says. “Otherwise how can you take responsibility for it, and why should you?”
Instead of just selling you things, a Cradle to Cradle economy would be more likely to sell you the use of things. As another speaker at the conference Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com pointed out at the conference, the average DIY power drill is used for between 6-20 minutes in its entire lifetime. This fixation with ownership of products and not services is a direct creator of waste.
People don’t really need to own their own drill, but they want a convenient way of putting holes in things. A more effective way of providing this than selling you a low quality drill you will hardly use might be to offer you the use of a top quality drill for the time you need it, or the inexpensive services of a well equipped drilling person.
That way the drill itself could be built to last, and its components to be easily re-used. Then nobody has to worry about what to do with all the unwanted drills.
If this all sounds like common sense, that’s because it is. And it’s catching on. Governments are taking notice, and big companies like Ford, Nike, Shaw carpets and BASF have already been given some Cradle to Cradle treatment.
It is early days for these ideas, and they are so far only being applied piecemeal in dispersed places. But how we design our way from cradle to grave to cradle to cradle, and resurrect our civilisation in the process, is now one of the most urgent and exciting questions facing humanity.