Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

Chapter 1 opens with a brief re-telling of the story the Titanic, the “unsinkable” ship that famously sank in 1912. The authors see the story of the Titanic as symbolic of many failures of the Industrial Revolution: “Like the 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” (17).

The majority of the chapter provides a sweeping history of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the United States. The authors acknowledge that the Industrial Revolution was largely unplanned, so it had many unintended consequences. The authors provide a bulleted list of these consequences, including: “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; erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices” (18).

The Industrial Revolution was ushered along by new machines that changed the manufacturing process entirely: “This change was spurred by a quick succession of new technologies” (19). The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning mule are just a few of the technologies created during the Industrial Revolution.

For example, the advent of the spinning jenny sped up not only the process of weaving fabric, but all the subsidiary processes of the textile industry: “In preindustrial times, exported fabrics would travel by canal or sailing ships, where were slow and unreliable in poor weather, weighted with high duties and strict laws, and vulnerable to piracy” (19). With the spinning jenny, fabrics needed to be exported at a more rapid pace. There were detractors from the advancements of the Industrial Revolution, particularly by those individuals who were left without work:

Like all paradigm shifts, this one encountered resistance. Cottage workers afraid of losing work and Luddites (followers of Ned Ludd)—experienced cloth makers angry about the new machines and the unapprenticed workers who operated them—smashed labor-saving equipment and made life difficult for inventors, some of whom died outcast and penniless before they could profit from their new machines (20).

This foreshadows detractors of the revolution that McDonough and Braungart propose. Then, an examination of Henry Ford shows the positive effects of modern industry. One was political: “Mass production had another democratizing aspect: as the Model T demonstrated, when prices of a previously unattainable item or service plummeted, more people had access to it” (23). The industrialists shared certain assumptions about the world, which has led to the present-day environmental predicament: “In the nineteenth century [...] the subtle qualities of the environment were not a widespread concern. Resources seemed immeasurably vast” (25). They believed that the earth’s resources were “perpetually regenerative” (25).

Another belief of early industrialists was that nature is something wild, which must be tamed: “At the same time, the Western view saw nature as a dangerous, brutish force to be civilized and subdued. Humans perceived natural forces as hostile, so they attacked back to exert control” (25). Overall, the authors see the Industrial Revolution as having brought about many positive social changes (employment opportunities, higher standards of living, technological advancements), but it also had “fundamental flaws,” which have had “devastating consequences” (26), greatly impacting the present era.

The next part of the chapter moves to the negative consequences of the Industrial Revolution. One of which is the current “cradle-to-grave model” (27) of design, which is the dominant method of present-day manufacturing. In the cradle-to-grave model of production, there is a finite lifespan to a product: “Resources are extracted, shaped into products, and eventually disposed of in a ‘grave’ of some kind, usually a landfill or incinerator” (27). Other movements grew from the cradle-to-grave model. For example, what the authors call a “one-size-fits-all” (28) design strategy. The “one-size-fits-all” approach means that products are designed for mass production, even though separate locations and populations have diverse needs. The authors use commercial laundry detergent as an example of why this method of design and manufacturing is problematic. Water quality and community needs differ across the United States, but laundry detergent is designed to work equally effective anywhere in the country. So, even though customers in the Northwest with soft water require only a small amount of detergent, they are using soap that is manufactured to operate as effectively in places that need a great deal of detergent to work, places with hard water like the Southwest. This causes unnecessary strain on the environment, by adding toxic chemicals across the United States, even when they are not needed.

Universal design solutions, like the example of laundry detergent, apply the broadest possible fixes to any given problem. However, the authors see this as problematic: “To achieve their universal design solutions, manufacturers design for a worst-case scenario; they design a product for the worst possible circumstance, so that it walls always operate with the same efficacy. This aim guarantees the largest possible market for a product” (30). Designing for the worst-case scenario means that “brute force” is used to make industrial processes fit into the local landscapes: “If the first Industrial Revolution had a motto, we like to joke, it would be ‘If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it’” (30).

Extraneous chemicals in the environment are not only taxing on the natural world, but to human beings as well. The authors also discuss how, the more environmental toxins present, the more taxed our immune systems are, making it more difficult to fight infection in general. The authors compare the human immune system to a juggler, with disease and infection as the balls. When chemicals and environmental toxins are present, the juggler has more trouble managing all the balls: “They [chemicals] weaken the immune system, which makes it much harder for him to catch the cancer cells before they cause problems” (41). Currently, economic activity—and not human or environmental health—is the main driver of industry:

Today’s industrial infrastructure is designed to chase economic growth. It does so at the expense of other vital concerns, particularly human and ecological health, cultural and natural richness, and even enjoyment and delight. Except for a few generally known positive side effects, most industrial methods and materials are unintentionally depletive(43).

The authors, in the chapters to follow, argue that economic gains do not have to be sacrificed to foster human and natural life on the planet.

This chapter looks closer at the current “green” and “eco-efficient” movements already afoot in many Western countries and finds them ineffective. From the outset of modern industry, there has been an impulse to curb negative effects of manufacturing on the environment: “The drive to make industry less destructive goes back to the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, when factories were so destructive and polluting that they had to be controlled in order to prevent immediate sickness and death” (45). However, this is still a contemporary concern. There is also a great literary tradition of artists—naturalists, as they are called—lamenting the devastation industry has wrought in the natural world (Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, etc.). For many present-day environmentalists, industrial growth will always be associated with negative consequences. The authors, even as environmentalists, do not share this belief.

In the 1990s, a new consumer standard, the “green” movement, grew from environmentalist concerns:“At the same time that these environmentalists were issuing important warnings, others were suggesting ways consumers could reduce their negative impact on the environment” (50). The authors discuss how the environmentalist and industrialist movement of the 1990s grew in tandem with one another, affecting the course of both movements. In 1992, the RioEarth Summit was held among the world’s leading industrialists and business people. Their mission was to address some of the major environmental problems that industry was wreaking on the environment. Both authors participated in this conference, and they witnessed there what was to become the current iterations of the “green” movement, in which “eco-efficiency” was the goal. The vision for “eco-efficiency” had great intentions: “Eco-efficiency would transform human industry from a system that takes, makes, and wastes into one that integrates economic, environmental, and ethical concerns. Industries across the globe now consider eco-efficiency to be the choice strategy of change” (51).

However, despite the good intentions at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the authors take great issues with the movement in its present form. The authors define “eco-efficiency” as, simply put, “doing more with less” (51). Waste, and the proper handling of that waste, is key to the eco-efficiency movement. The authors go through various waste reduction strategies (such as, landfill creation and trash incineration), noting that despite our best efforts, most wastes are still harmful to the environment: “Air, water, and soil do not safely absorb our wastes unless the wastes themselves are completely healthy and biodegradable” (55). The authors debunk the myth of biodegradability:

When so-called biodegradable municipal wastes, including packaging and paper, are composted, the chemicals and toxins in the materials can be released into the environment. Even if these toxins exist in minute amounts, the practice may not be safe. In some cases, it would actually be less dangerous to seal the materials in a landfill (56).

The authors uncover the ways that the eco-efficient movement is not as protective or helpful to the environment as it seems. In addition to being unfriendly to the environment, the eco-efficient movement has produced less than ideal designs: “In all of these cases, the agenda to recycle has superseded other design considerations” (59). Industries built around eco-efficiency are seen as a nuisance to most companies, due to the many regulations that they must follow in order to be branded as eco-efficient:“In this instance as in many others, an ecological agenda becomes a burden for industry instead of the rewarding option” (59).

In summary, the authors see the positive aspects and goals of the eco-efficient movement, but they also do not think it is a viable long-term system:

Eco-efficiency is an outwardly admirable, even noble, concept, but it is not a strategy for success of the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, merely slowing it down with moral prescriptions and punitive measures (62).

According to the authors, eco-efficient manufacturing process are both burdensome to industry and environment, making it a lose-lose situation: “Eco-efficient factories are held up as models of modern manufacturing. But in truth man of them are only distributing their pollution in less obvious ways” (64). Instead, the authors suggest working outside of our current systems. Instead of being “less bad,” as the eco-efficient movement would have us, the authors suggest that industry be made completely good: “What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?” (67). The authors explore this notion in the following chapters.