Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

The authors call for entirely new industrial processes, and they argue that these new processes should be modelled after the natural world. Trees, for example, best embody their “cradle to cradle” philosophy. Trees have no waste and the byproducts that they produce (oxygen, flowers, etc.) all nourish their environment. This is the “cradle to cradle” philosophy in action. The authors discuss ants as an example of a species that is productive and industrious without being destructive to the environment:

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 (16).

The authors see ants as emblematic—it is not the fault of nature that our industrial systems do not work, it is a design flaw with our industrial systems: “Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do” (16).

Eco-efficiency is the reigning strategy for cleaning up our industrial processes. Although the authors have many issues with the terms, they still recognize its merits: “The term eco-efficiency was official coined five years later by the Business Council for Sustainable Development, a group of forty-eight industrial sponsors including the Dow, DuPont, Conagra, and Chevron, who had been asked to bring a business perspective to the Earth Summit” (52).

In Chapter 3, the authors discuss the cherry tree as an extended example of “eco-effectiveness,” using it to tease out the differences between their philosophy and “eco-efficiency” (72). Cherry trees create thousands of blossoms, which “create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals” (72). Even when the blossoms fall from the tree and decompose, they nourish the ground along with microorganisms, insects, plants, and other animals. What’s more, the cherry tree is beautiful; it brings pleasure and delight to those who view it. For the cherry tree, there is no “waste”—every byproduct of the tree supports life and the natural systems around it.

Also in Chapter 3, the authors imagine what a factory might look like if it were designed by a cherry tree: “The factory was designed to celebrate the local landscape and to invite indigenous species back to the site instead of scaring them away” (75). Ants are yet another example of nature’s industriousness, and an excellent model for the authors’ conception of “eco-effectiveness” in that ants “truly are, as biologist E.O. Wilson has pointed out, the little things that run the world. But although they may run the world, they do not overrun it. Like the cherry tree, they make the world a better place” (80).

The authors reject the idea that, if humanity destroys Earth, then perhaps we can find life on other planets. The authors point out how humanity evolved on Earth, and not Mars, for a reason, and that reason is that the earth’s processes are perfectly tailored to human beings’ needs as a species. The authors, instead, recommend that humanity embraces the earth’s processes and become a “native” (87) to the environment. Becoming a “native,” as the authors describe it, entails embracing the natural world as if there is nowhere else to go—we live on this planet, and we must take care of it: ”We are not leaving this land either, and we will begin to become native to it when we recognize this fact” (89).

According to the authors, the Western impulse to “reduce, reuse, recycle” is well-intentioned, but it does not address the root of the problems embedded in our industrial systems that harm the environment. Recycling is one of many systems designed to help the Environment, but really it hurts it.

There are many ironies imbedded into our current industrial practices, and the authors go through many examples to demonstrate the corruption and backwardness of these systems. For example, they examine children’s swim wings, a safety device: “An analysis of a child’s swim wings, made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), showed that they off-gassed potentially harmful substances—including, under heat, hydrochloric acid” (40).There is an irony that a safety device poses such a great hazard to the child who wears it, and the authors depict it as “not a great bargain, and surely not what the manufacturers had in mind when they created this child-safety device” (40). There are other ironies imbedded in our industrial systems. For example, that many of our industrial systems are “chipping away at some of the basic achievements that industrialization brought about”(43), as the authors point out when discussing global hunger.

An example of the ways in which being “less bad” is problematic can be found incurrent recycling practices. Recycling is understood to be a positive program for both industry and the environment, but when examined closely the authors find that recycling does not benefit either industry or the environment in the long run. The authors refer to “recycling” as “downcycling” to make their point:

Recycled? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say downcycled. Good intentions aside, your rug is made of things that were never designed with this further use in mind, and wrestling them into this form has required much energy—and generated as much waste—as producing a new carpet. And all that effort has only succeeded in postponing the usual fate of products by a life cycle or two (4).

The authors discuss the problems with recycling at length in Chapter 2, one of which is that just because a product has been recycled does not mean it is “ecologically benign” (59). For example, a product with toxic chemicals, if recycled, will carry those toxic chemicals forward, which could produce new chemical effects as time wears on. Meaning, as the recycling processes continue, the new products have the potential to become even more toxic: “The creative use of downcycled materials for new products can be misguided, despite good intentions” (58).