Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things | William McDonough, Michael Braungart |...

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things | William McDonough, Michael Braungart | excellent, even oustanding

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Cradle to Cradle: ...

	Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things William McDonough, Michael Braungart North Point Press, 2002 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 148 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism"Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue in their provocative, visionary book, however, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world, they ask.In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, the authors make an exciting and viable case for change.

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Visionaries!

McDonough & Baumgarten have re-envisioned how companies might redesign their manufacturing processes to actually leave the environment better than they found it. And create better products in the end, products that people will want to buy because they are well-designed.

What I love about this book is that their vision is mostly a PRIVATE sector solution. They believe that business is the solution, not the problem. They say entrepreneurs are the ones best suited to develop creative solutions to environmental issues, and ultimately better, less expensive products. That is, cheaper in the truest sense--no externalities, nothing in the landfill, no costs of disposal foisted off on the taxpayers to clean up. Materials would go back into manufacturing more goods--not just recycling for lower-level uses, but true recycling. This would save on our use and wastage of original materials also.

Favorite quote: "Government regulation points to a design flaw." They envision a world where environmental regulations become obsolete because businesses operate cleanly. This would become a norm. Regulations would be a rare backup system, because sustainable design would be profitable.

Every business person should read this book. We're obviously not there yet, not anywhere close, but I was inspired to think hard about all my operations! They have a vision to work toward, and it will not be a world of scarcity and deprivation.

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excellent, even oustanding

Great book, in perfect condition and as I saw on screen that s how i received at home.

PERFECT!

This book was in perfect condition when I received it and the really cool thing about it is that its WATERPROOF which means you can read it pretty much anywhere-in the shower, underwater, at the beach or even in a fish tank! The book gives you scary insight on how we are destroying our earth and killing ourselves slowly and simultaneously!!!

Seeing ourselves as all being part of the great cradle to cradle cycle is an important step forward.

For those to are ecologically minded, a key part of creating any new product is to produce a life cycle assessment (LCA), which is also known as a cradle-to-grave analysis, working from manufacture (`cradle') to use and disposal (`grave'). The LCA investigates all of the environmental impacts of that product and attempts to minimise that damage. One of the key premises of McDonough & Brangart's book, is that minimising damage just isn't good enough. Instead, the authors propose that we change our entire design processes so that reuse and nourishment are built right into the process. Instead of minimising waste, we create value. Cradle to Cradle goes beyond the notion of having recycling as the final step in a process flow, and instead builds on the idea that waste need not exist at all. We can design our lives and products around the notion of nourishment - from the way we live to (primarily) how we design and produce goods. The natural world provides the template for what the authors suggest, from the regenerative world of the insect, to the cherry tree, to the use of natural nutrients such as solar and wind power. They suggest that the key to working within, rather than against, nature is to respect biodiversity, respect the elegance and abundance of what is around us, and begin our design process with the notion of there is no such thing as waste.

The writing style itself is clear, simple, and suitable for all ages and knowledge levels. Different readers will take different things from the book. It is addressed to those that do design for a living, and for those who are professionals in industry, this book will serve as a manual for development. But all of us are engaged in creation and consumption in one way or another (the machine I'm using to type this on, or the reams of paper my kids draw on to take two general examples) and the choices we make on how we will conduct those activities, and seeing ourselves as all being part of the great cradle to cradle cycle is an important step forward.

The book spends some time discussing the whole notion of dangerous design principles, including the way in which "downcycling" only defers the problem as products become more and more unstable (and environmental problematic) as they are recycled. Although I've yet to see plastic books become a trend, the book itself is an example of how a product can be manufactured in a way that will be infinitely valuable. It's made out of synthetic paper which doesn't use wood pulp or any dangerous inks or substances, and is both waterproof and pleasurable to read, with nice thick pages and clear ink. The book goes into quite a lot of detail about what it would mean to design products that weren't less bad, but rather 100% good. The authors look at architecture and how we can design buildings that take into account the diversity of their settings, and the natural needs of their inhabitants.

The book concludes with "Five Steps to Eco-Effectiveness", a neat summary of how to put the philosophical principles discussed in the book into practice. Some of these, such as "Step 2: Follow informed personal preferences" may seem a little unusual, advocating that we use our aesthetic sense, our observations and our own sense of pleasure (yes, pleasure) to guide our design decisions. While others, such as "Step 4: Reinvent" may seem almost too broad for the average reader. However, the book is full of so many specific examples, primarily from industry, that it's easy to picture what they are advocating working in practice. After all, the book itself is not only beautifully and safely designed to fit the "cradle-to-cradle" philosophy, it is also written in a way that is easily read, linguistically elegant and appealing, and sound in its advice. As a writer, I can see the sense in taking on this wholistic approach to environmentalism, ditching the hysteria and the mass of finger-pointing practices which look green but which don't actually make much of a difference, and taking on this approach in a whole body sense. It's powerful stuff and the impact is starting to happen, perhaps a little too slowly, but, as the authors say, "it's going to take forever...that's the point."

Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening.

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