47 pages • 1-hour read
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Eco-Effectiveness”
Chapter 3 opens with a “tale of three books” (68). The authors describe three possible ways of making a book: the traditional way, the “eco-friendly” way, and then an entirely new way, based on methods devised by the authors. Drawing out the differences among these three methods show flaws in the current book manufacturing process, while also offering a vision for the future.
In traditional book manufacturing, the paper is made of wood pulp, which comes from trees. The authors assess the traditional book object as beautiful but impermanent: “Yet attractive, functional, and durable as it is, the book will not last forever—nor, if it is ‘beach reading,’ do we necessarily expect it to” (68).Even when book pages are recycled, the ink printed on the paper can cause damage to natural water sources if it is recycled improperly, so manufacturers are left with two bad options:“What a quandary: pollute rivers or chew up forests” (69). With the third book—“the book of the future” (70), the authors call it—it is made from synthetic material that can be recycled infinitely as a book, without causing any harm to the environment. The authors see this third book as a way of honoring the industry’s needs, the environment’s needs, and people’s needs:
It [the third book] celebrates materials rather than apologizing for them. Books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas. Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word (71).
The authors then consider another facet:“What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?” (73). They surmise that all of our processes would, like the cherry tree, give back to and enhance our environment. The authors consider growth and find that growth is not necessarily bad, but it depends on the context:
Ask a child about growth, and she will probably tell you it is a good thing, a natural thing—it means getting bigger, healthier, and stronger. The growth of nature (and of children) is usually perceived as beautiful and healthy. Industrial growth, on the other hand, has been called into question by environmentalists and others concerned about the rapacious use of resources and the disintegration of culture and environment (77).
However, the authors are not anti-industrial growth, even though in its current state it does much damage to the natural world: “The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world” (78). A good model for a sizeable population that does minimal damage to the earth are ants. Ants, even though they are large in numbers, do not do damage to the environment: “[Ants] are a good example of a population whose density and productiveness are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature” (79). The population growth of ants, unlike humankind, is not problematic to the environment whatsoever—the opposite, in fact, that they nourish and replenish their surrounding environment.
Although the authors propose radical changes, they reassure the reader that these changes are not necessarily difficult to achieve: “It’s not the solution itself that is necessarily radical but the shift in perspective with which we begin, from the old view of nature as something to be controlled to a stance of engagement” (84). To that end, they encourage the reader—and industrial and manufacturing professionals—to view themselves as “native” (86) to their surroundings. That means tuning into the needs of your specific location and appreciating the resources that it has to offer without depleting it.
The authors discuss the belief that, if humans destroy Earth, then perhaps we will be able to re-build life on another planet. The authors think this idea is preposterous, and they emphasize that humans were meant to live on this planet: “Seriously, humans evolved on the Earth, and we are meant to be here. Its atmosphere, its nutrients, its natural cycles and our own biological systems evolved together and support us here, now” (87). Humans are “native” to the environment on Earth, so we must take care of it.
To that end, the authors suggest that industries reject the “existing destructive framework” (90) and set out to construct the following:“buildings that, like trees, produce more energy than they consume and purify their own waste water; transportation that improves the quality of life while delivering goods and services; a world of abundance, not one of limits, pollution, and waste” (90-91).
These recommendations set the stage for the following chapter, which suggests that all industrial “waste” (which is to say, any byproduct) should enrich the world around it.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Waste Equals Food”
In Chapter 4, the authors argue that we must do away with the concept of “waste.” For human industrial and manufacturing systems, we generate trash and other hazardous materials that are discarded—either into a landfill or disposed of in some other way. The authors, however, look to the natural world and see that “waste” does not exist: “Nature operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolisms in which there is no such thing as waste” (92). As with the example of trees, all of their byproducts—their “waste”—are useful to the environment. The authors, then, go on to suggest that humans should model themselves after nature in this way; every industrial manufacturing process should not be designed with a “grave” in mind, but rather a “cradle” where the materials are used over and over again, ad infinitum.
The authors further define in this chapter the idea of “cradle-to-cradle,” and in order to do this, they discuss what they term “nutrient flows” (93). An example of a “nutrient flow” would be how food is transformed to human energy, then to waste that fertilizes the soil, which in turn helps a plant to grow. The authors see several types of “nutrient flows” that vary from place to place and culture to culture. As modern civilization continued, humanity learned to harness certain nutrient flows:
Over time cities all over the world built up an infrastructure for transferring nutrients from place to place. Cultures went into conflict with other cultures for resources, land, and food. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, synthetic fertilizers were developed, laying the ground for the massively intensified production of industrialized agriculture (95).
Due to industrialized agriculture, humans no longer have natural nutrient flows. One example of a culture that has long understood its own culture’s nutrient flows is Egyptians along the Nile river. The authors ask why, in early civilizations, was consumption not as bad for the environment as it is now. They explain: “In preindustrial culture, people did consume things. Most products would safely biodegrade once they were thrown away, buried, or burned” (97). However, with our current modes of manufacturing, products are built to be thrown away—they are finite objects with a definite “grave” in mind at the onset of creation. An ordinary toaster, for example, makes no sense to invest in because it was created with low quality materials: “Who on Earth would repair a cheap toaster today? It is much easier to buy a new one then it is to send the parts back to the manufacturer, or track someone to repair it locally” (97).
Because products are made with such low-quality material, recycling these objects becomes dangerous because toxic materials are being recirculated: “But as long as these uses are ignored by current industrial design and manufacturing, which typically refrain from embracing any vision of a product’s further life, such reuse will often be unsafe, even lethal” (98). The authors borrow a phrase from Jane Jacobs to describe this phenomenon: the “monstrous hybrid” (98). A “monstrous hybrid” is defined as “mixtures of materials both technical and biological, neither of which can be salvaged after their current lives” (99).When industrial and natural materials are combined—as is the case with many of our modern-day products—neither the natural material nor the industrial material can be salvaged. The authors discuss this in terms of the conventional shoe. Sewage is another example of a “monstrous hybrid.”
The authors outline how to move from cradle-to-grave to cradle-to-cradle manufacturing processes, and part of doing that involves understanding the “two metabolisms” (103) that regulate all modern human life. Ironically, if we do not radically change our current industrial systems, the earth will become a “grave,” as the authors state:
If our systems contaminate Earth’s biological mass and continue to throw away technical materials (such as metals) or render them useless, we will indeed live in a world of limits, where production and consumption are restrained and the Earth will literally become a grave (103).
The two metabolisms are one that is biological and another that is technical. The biological metabolism is all the organic systems in the natural world, while the technological metabolism is all the man-made systems in the industrial world. When these two metabolisms interact with one another, our present-day problems with “monstrous hybrids” occur.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In Chapter 3, a book is used as the primary example to illustrate the industrial manufacturing products of past, present, and future. Using a book as the example—and especially the synthetically created “book of the future” that is Cradle to Cradle—connects the reader to the industrial and manufacturing processes the authors describe in an intimate way.
In the first section of the book, the authors explain the history leading up to our current predicament. Beginning with Chapter 3, the authors begin to dive more deeply into their argument about “eco-effectiveness,” and why that philosophy should be embraced going forward. Inherent in the concept of eco-effectiveness is long-term thinking; it is why being “less bad” in the immediate does not work because being “less bad” still invokes harm on the environment for generations to come. Examined from all angles, the authors find the “less bad” approach unviable: “Once again, being less bad proves to be a fairly unappealing option, practically, aesthetically, and environmentally” (70). To be explored in the remainder of the book, the authors set the stage to show exactly why there is an urgent need to re-think all of our manufacturing and industrial processes.
The cradle-to-cradle philosophy first mentioned in earlier chapters is explored at length in Chapter 4. A cornerstone of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy is that, as early as the design phase, the product’s ultimate purpose should be kept in mind: “Once we set about designing with such missions in mind—the short-term usefulness, convenience, and aesthetic pleasure of the product together with the ongoing life of its materials—the process of innovation begins in earnest” (72). When we think of the life cycle of a product as everlasting, innovation must occur. Crux of their argument, and the book’s namesake, appears in Chapter 4.
Another important element of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy is that it will not only affect the products, it will also change every living being involved in the system, from factory workers inside the factories to citizens living just outside them. Quality of life, overall, is important to the authors’ approach. In discussing an eco-effective factory that the authors helped design, the talk about how part of their objective was to make the factory workers’ lives more humane: “We wanted to give workers the feeling that they’d spent the day outdoors, unlike workers in the conventional factory of the Industrial Revolution, who might not see daylight until the weekend” (75). The eco-effective approach is a holistic one, which considers the manufacturing industrial system as a whole, even for the workers creating the products themselves. This feeds into a larger point the authors make about interdependence. All systems are interconnected, each one relying on the other: “But it is useful to think of these processes as part of a dynamic interdependence, in which many different organisms and systems support one another in multiple ways” (80). When one part of the system is not working, or less than ideal; it usually indicates that something else in the system is not working, as well. For that reason, the authors do not focus on any one single outcome:
Just about every process has side effects. But they can be deliberate and sustaining instead of unintended and pernicious. We can be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of nature’s activity, and we can also be inspired by it to design some positive side effects to our own enterprises instead of focusing exclusively on a single end (81).
Industry should not be disconnected from human life, as it is now: “But we also believe that industry can be so safe, effective, enriching, and intelligent that it need not be fenced off from other human activity” (87).
As part of a major theme in the book, the authors stress that we have an entirely flawed system. In order to find solutions, we must think outside the system. We must come up with an entirely new framework. Eco-effectiveness, as the authors envision it, can be that entirely new framework: “Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things—on the right products and services and systems—instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them ‘right,’ with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense” (76).
Another key concept introduced in this chapter is that of “waste equals food” (92). Humans, the authors point out, are one of the only species on Earth who create toxic waste that must be processed in treatment plants or landfills. They consider the earth’s waste as “nutrients” due to natural processes: “The Earth’s major nutrients—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—are cycled and recycled. Waste equals food” (92). In Chapter 4, the authors do away with the concept of “waste” and instead encourage the reader to think in terms of “nutrient flows” (95).
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