Cradle to Cradle

Some Parts I liked in this book;

"This book is not a tree"
We see a world of abundance, not limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an acological footprint to delight in, not lament?
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

Chpt 1
One might say that 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 tis design presage tragedy and disaster.

Designing and Industrial Revolution
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 generation
Results in gigantic amount 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 system 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 burrying or burning them
Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices

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 industrilization boomed, other instittions 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.

This 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 acquisiton 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.

Viewed from a design perspective, the Model T epitomized the general goal of the first industrialists: to make a product that was desirable, affordable and operable by anyone, just about anywhere; that lasted a certain amount of time (until it was time to buy a new one); and that could be produced cheaply and quickly. Along these lines, technical developments centered on increasing "power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, speed,"to use the Ford manufacturing checklist for mass production.

New studies indicate that the oceans, the air, the mountains, and the plants and animals that inhabit them are more valnurable than early innovators ever imagined.

At its deepest foundation, the industrial infrastructure we have today is linear: it is focused on making a product and getting it to a customer quickly and cheaply without considering much else.

Most of the products that we use today are designed on a linear, one-way cradle-to-grave model. Resources are extracted, shaped into products, sold, and eventually disposed of in a "grave" of some kind, usually a landfill or incinerator.

Think about it: you may be referred to as a consumer, but there is very little that you actually consume-some food, some liquids. Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. But where is "away"? Of course, "away" does not really exist. "Away" has gone away.

More than 90 percent of materials extracted to make durable goods in the United Staets become waste almost immediately.
In fact, many products are designed with "built-in obsolescence", to last only for a certain period of time, to allow-to encourage-the customer to get rid of the thing and buy a new model. Also, what most people see in their garbage cans is just the tip of a material iceberg; the product itself contains on average only 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.

Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place-from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region's distinctness or style.
With their sealed windows, constantly humming air conditioners, heating systems, lack of daylight and fresh air, and uniform fluorescent lighting, they might as well have been designed to house machines, not humans.

In product design, a classic example of the universal design solution is mass-produced detergent. major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the US or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But the detergents are designed so they will lather up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world-in hard, soft, urban, or spring water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants. Manufacturers just add more chemical force to wipe ot the conditions of circumstance.
To achieve their universal design solutios, manufacurers design for a worst-case scenario; they design a product for the worst possible circumstance, so that it will always operate with the same efficacy. Designing for the worst case at all times reflects the assumption that nature is the enemy.

All of nature's industry relies on energy from the sun, which can be viewed as a form of current, constantly renewing income. Humans, by contrast, extract and burn fossil fuels such as coal and petrochemicals that have been deposited deep below the Earth's surface, supplementing them with energy produced through waste-incineration processes and nuclear reactors that create additional problems. They do this with little or no attention to harnessing or maximizing local natural energy flows. The standard operating instruction seems to be "If too hot or too cold, just add more fossil fuels."

A warmer atmosphere draws more water from oceans, resulting in bigger, wetter, more frequent storms, rises in sea level, shifts in seasons, and a chain of other climatic events.

Rather than being designed around a natural and cultural landscape, most modern urban areas simply grow, as has often been said, like a cancer, spreading more and more of themselves, eradicating the living environment in the process, blanketing the natural landscape with layers of asphalt and concrete.

Most conventional operations today focus on highly specialized, hybridized, and perhaps genetically modified species of corn. They develop a monocultural landscape that appears to support only one particular crop that's likely not even a true species but some over-hybridized cultivar. Planters remove other species of plant life using tillage, which leads to massive soil erosion from wind and water, or no-till farming, which requires massive aplications of herbicide. Ancient strains of corn are lost because their output does not meet the demands of modern commerce.