In celebration of diversity and consumption this NOISE I thought I’d touch on the Cradle to Cradle design philosophy, The UK edition of the book has just been launched and I went along to listen to it’s co-author, Michael Braungart, give a quick introduction at IOM3.

The main premise behind the book is that we need to re-think our design of things so that they imitate the cycles of nature, where waste equals food. For this to happen, we should consider materials as nutrients that will feed the cycles, whether they be organic nutrients that will biodegrade or technical nutrients that can be ‘up-cycled’ into another product. The problem with current re-cycling is that the materials are often coated or mixed with other chemicals, or difficult to separate into individual parts, thus the resulting material is a lesser grade hybrid of its constituent parts, a process coined in the book as ‘down cycling’.

Hand in hand with this is the careful consideration and selection of the materials themselves in order to ensure that they are safe nutrients for their respective cycle. Michael Braungart gave some worrying examples of material choices that would appear contrary to their design intent, for example many children’s toys contain heavy metals and other toxins that will find their way into a child’s blood stream. Similarly, many paints and finishes “off-gas” poisonous substances throughout their life, which means that our offices and homes are actually giant gas chambers! He warns about being ‘less bad’ since this doesn’t actually solve a problem, his slightly provocative example being that a more efficient Nazi is still a Nazi! Similarly we need to be careful with our celebration of what isn’t in a product, ‘chlorine’ or ‘lead free’ may in fact mean that other harmful products are used in their place. Instead we should make things that are good and positive in all respects, so the soles of shoes which will inevitably rub into particles on the floor, should be nutritious to the environment they rub off into, or a building that like a tree actively purifies the air inside it, generates energy and cleans water. This can seem a bit far fetched, but Cradle to Cradle’s work with Ford, Nike and many other companies and even entire countries is beginning to show otherwise.

The upshot of all this would be healthy, safe and abundant cycles of materials and products, that have a positive effect on their environment and the planet as a whole. We would no longer need the guilt language of ‘use less’, ‘reduce’, ‘minimise’, instead we could celebrate the use and abundance of each ‘nutrient’ since with this we would be feeding the cycles.