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Cradle
to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,
by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.
Picking up this environmental treatise on manufacturing
goods, one notices something different about the physical
book itself: the pages lack a familiar texture, grain, even
sound as one flips through them. This difference comes from
the fact the pages aren't paper -- derived from trees or
recycled from other paper -- but synthetic, a plastic. While
this might seem to go against common sense (surely paper
made from renewable trees or recycled paper is better for
the environment than man-made plastic?), it is just one
of the many conventional wisdoms that the authors -- McDonough
an architect and Braungart a chemist -- turn on their heads
throughout its nearly 200 pages.
With their "cradle to cradle" (c2c) thinking,
when paper and other other materials are recycled it is
actually "downcycled", meaning its qualities is
diminished. One example is that many plastics used for soda
bottles and other household products eventually become things
like park benches instead of more soda bottles. Sure, it's
great to have park benches (without making judgment on the
quality or the appropriateness of recycled benches over
other designs) but if the soda bottle was "upcycled"
back into a soda bottle, it would create a closed loop,
a c2c cycle, as opposed to today's cradle to grave flow
of goods.
Getting back to the book itself, its plastic pages are
chemically designed to be upcycled back into paper. Even
its ink is designed to wash off the pages with extremely
hot water, unlike traditional inks on paper that require
bleaching for their removal. So McDonough and Braungart
have essentially made their book an advertisement for their
thinking. With the book as an example, if everything we
consume were made with the same c2c approach, the objects
would be slightly different yet basically the same, though
this might not apply to more harmful products that should
be eliminated or rethought entirely (such as harsh household
cleaners). Ultimately the authors are optimistic about our
future, hopeful that humans can rethink and remake the world
around them to fit into nature's cycles, a remarkably ambitious
prospect but one not entirely impossible. Reading this book
definitely helps give the reader an understanding of what
surrounds them and then hopefully spurs them to not accept
the conventional wisdom that made it what it was.
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