by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Last year I read Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver which, in a series of essays, eloquently describes many of the environmental challenges we face. It’s sobering to come face to face with the reality that our very way of life is depleting and destroying the planet. That is why I found this book so incredibly inspiring. William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a chemist, come at this vexing problem in a fresh, new way that filled me with a sense of optimism about our environmental future. They challenge our “typical” beliefs about how to help our environment and describe an out-of-the-box approach that promises to have an enormous impact.
"Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. As McDonough and Braungart argue, 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).
They share a number of examples from their work with companies like Nike, Ford Motor Company and Herman Miller. My favorite is the transformation in a small, Swiss textile factory where the entire process of making commercial fabrics was redesigned to be consistent with waste=food. At the outset, the company was grappling with the regulatory reality that their fabric trimmings were considered hazardous waste, creating thorny and expensive disposal issues. By redesigning their process and choosing inputs that are harmless biological nutrients – a huge detective task involving some of the biggest chemical companies in the world – they are now producing award-winning fabric that can be composted after its useful life is complete – and the water leaving the factory is cleaner than the water that enters it.
They are using this kind of paradigm shifting thinking to usher in the next industrial revolution – one that uses the natural world as its inspiration and acknowledges that being “less bad” environmentally is no good - it only gets us to the same devastating place, just more slowly. They are proving it is possible to use these natural design principles to create products, services, buildings and industries that are inherently good because they were designed with that as their ultimate intention.
If you’d prefer the movie version, you can order the DVD “The Next Industrial Revolution.”
Check out McDonough and Braungart’s firm.
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Posted by: replica watches | November 23, 2011 at 12:45 AM