William McDonough, Michael Braungart
Excellent book detailing how exactly we can begin to stop incessantly raping the earth. Improving the way we build and manufacture things: build things to be recovered and reused, not recycled, but upcycled – made into more valuable or at least equally valuable things after being consumed instead of lesser.
This book is great: insightful, interesting, revolutionary in how it looks at what we should (and more importantly can) do now to not only stop hurting our environment, but start helping it improve by changing the methods we use to build and produce. Its even printed on recycled (and recyclable) plastics with non-toxic inks.
Everywhere we turned, we could see products, packaging, buildings, transportation, even whole cities that were poorly designed. And we could see that conventional envirnomental approaches – even the most well intended and progressive ones – didn’t get it. 14
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a greater biomass then 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 a little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do. 16
The product [a manufactured one] itself contains only 5% of the materials involved in the process of making and delivering it. 28
The current global design market just doesn’t serve the people right, instead of doing a decent job of serving a wide variety of people differently, it does a shitty job of serving all the people in the same fashion. 30, 2nd p
It [above] also reveals human industry’s peculiar relationship to the natural world, since designing for the worst case at all times reflects the assumption that nature is the enemy. 30
The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and keep it in uniform – all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small yellow flower that rears it’s head!
Rather then being designed around a natural and cultural landscape, most modern areas simply grow, as has often been said, like a cancer, spreading more and more of themselves, eradicating the living environment in the process, blanketing the natural landscape with layers of asphalt and concrete. 33
Pesticides wreck farming – they ruin soil after years of use, leading to low economic gains, hurt the culture of farming by putting families away from farm communities (because they get poisoned). Immediately raising the gains in farming, they encourage monoculture and greatly decrease productivity and earnings in the long run. 35
GDP is not a great indicator of economic success:
...if prosperoty is judged just by economic activity, then car accidents, hospital visits, illnesses (such as cancer), and toxic spills are all signs of prosperity. Loss of resources, cultural depletion, negative socal and enviromental effects, reduction of quality of life – these ill can all be taking place, an entire region can be in decline, yet they are negated by a simplistic economic figure that says life is good. 37
...high-tech products are usually composed of low-quality materials – that is, cheap plastics and dyes – globally sourced from the lowest-cost provider, which may be half way across the world. This means that even substances banned from use in the U.S. and Europe can reach this country via products and parts made elsewhere. 39
And all this shit we live in and around every day really messes us up – cancer and all that.
...rather then a readily identifiable illness, some people develop an allergy, or multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, or asthma, or they just do not feel well, without knowing exactly why. Even if we experience no immediate ill effects, coming into constant contact with carcinogens like benzene and vinyl chloride may be unwise. 40
Manufacturing today is wasteful, dirty, and fairly inefficient. Todays green movement though doesn’t do much to combat the waste and inefficiency going on, because all they want to do is reduce the rate at which it happens. But it still happens. Whatever solution proposed by environmentalists today, waste is just moved from one place to another or transformed from one for into another 55. Composting doesn’t work unless materials were intended to be composted, which excludes most manufactured products 56. Todays recycling is really just downgrading used up materials into something less then they were originally – and losing much of the energy used in their creation and their potential to make something better in the process 56.
Just because material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better – and perhaps even worse. 59
...ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an “acceptable” rate. 61
Plainly put, eco-efficiency only works to make thw old, destructive system a bit less so. In some cases it can be more pernicious, because its workings are more subtle and long term. An ecosystem might actually have more of a change to become healthy and whole again after a quick collapse that leaves some niches intact then with a slow, deliberate, and efficient destruction of the whole. 62
...what would it mean to be entirely good? 67
We leave aside the old model of product-and-waste, and its dour offspring, “efficiency,” and embrace the challenge of being not efficient, but effective with respect to a rich mix of considerations and desires. 72
Cherry Tree example: tree blooms, complicated process, with end result of producing more trees. But in the meantime, the tree creates a complex sub system of blossoms which are beautiful until they fall to the earth to provide food for animals and eventually they become composted into the soil, to nourish the tree that created them and any newly sprouting trees 73
The tree is in no way at all efficient, but it is masterfully effective – it not only accomplishes its original goal, but also improves every aspect of its local environment.
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
Human industry has never gone to do something to this effect – when we do it will be revolutionary, and different. We might even need to look at all of this from an entirely new perspective.
Humans are the only species that take from the soil vast quantities of nutrients needed for biological processes but rarely puts them back in a usable form. Our systems are no longer designed to return nutrients in this way, except on small, local levels. [...] It can take approximately five hundred years for soil to build up an inch of its rich layers of microorganisms and nutrient flows, and right now we are losing five thousand times more then is being made. 96
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things – products, packaging, and systems – from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. 104
Why do we package everything in plastics? The product containers can last hundreds of years longer then the products they hold, and for what? 105
This idea of giving back instead of taking does work – the authors architecture firm designed a european factory using green, cradle to cradle methods and by using natural and effective fabric chemicals and dyes turned the factory excrement from toxic to cleaner then the river water that came into the plant. 108
Use a subscriber model for products, not a consumer one. Instead of buying a carpet, rent one until you want a new color, at which point you send the old one back to the factory so it can be processed and its materials turned into your new carpet 113. This way the customer gets what they want as long as they want it, and new stuff whenever they feel like it. It’s more efficient for both parties 111
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The advantages of this system, when fully implemented, would be threefold: it would produce no useless and potentially dangerous waste; it would save manufacturers billions of dollars in valuable materials over time; and, because nutrients for new products are constantly circulated, it would diminish the extraction of raw materials (such as petrochemicals) and the manufacture of potentially disruptive materials, such as PVC, and eventually phase them out, resulting in more savings to the manufacturer and enormous benefits to the environment. 115
Imagine a building like a tree, a city like a forest. 139
When diversity is nature’s design framework, human design solutions that do not respect it degrade the ecological and cultural fabric of our lives, and greatly diminish enjoyment and delight. 143
The health of the site [Ford’s new manufacturing plant] is measured not in terms of meeting minimum government-imposed standards bit with respect to things like the number of earthworms per cubic feet of soil, the diversity of birds and insects on the land and of aquatic species in a nearby river, the attractiveness of the site to local residents. The work is governed by a compelling goal: creating a factory site where Ford employees’ own children could safely play. 162
In 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison in which he argued that a federal bond should be repaid within one generation of the debt, because as he put it, “The earth belongs … to the living … No man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeeded hum in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generation to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not the living.” 186
Hello modern world, hows it goin’ these days?
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