Cradle to Cradle (Book Review)
Monday, March 10th, 2008
When I first saw William McDonough on a tv documentary titled Waste = Food (available as the full 60 minute DVD) the depth of his message struck me as being on a par with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. In The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle he asks what our design intention is as a dominant species? And what is the first question for designers? Because so much design is begun from the wrong question which leads to products which ultimately pollute the environment and poison our children.
Design should be asking the first question - not growth or no growth but what do you want to grow?
Cradle to Cradle, a book written with the German chemist Michael Braungart, discusses these concepts of waste = food and how we should be designing everything from the ground up. Our designs should be looking to maintain two systems, the biological systems of sustainable resources which return back to the environment (for example decomposable packaging with native seeds that replant as we dispose of our goods) and technical systems which take back our technical waste and re-use it as technical inputs into our products. An example of a technical system would be where a component can be taken back by a company and re-used at its current quality (not down-cycled to a lesser quality resource which is our current paradigm of recycling).
I particularly like the quote from William in The Wisdom of Designing Cradle to Cradle which goes:
