I just came across an interesting interview with Michael Braungart  in which he proposes a new model for manufacture and consumption. He calls it Cradle to Cradle (C2C).

Instead of making and selling a washing machine, he says, he can make a washing machine and sell 3,000 washing cycles. The consumer essentially leases the machine. At the end of the lease, the company replaces obsolete components and a new lease begins.

That way, says Braungart, he can make machines with higher-quality parts and ensure no part of the machine ever winds up in a landfill.

It reminds me of telephone service before the breakup of “Ma Bell.” The phone company owned the phones. It was responsible if anything went wrong, so it built phones to last.

Braungart insists his way of making washing machines will enable more innovation and creativity. But most people who comment on phone service say that the breakup of the phone monopoly has enabled more innovation and creativity.

So is Cradle to Cradle the next new concept beyond sustainability, or just another slogan?

The Cradle to Cradle concept

As it turns out, C2C isn’t quite new. Braungart and William McDonough developed the idea in the 1990s. They introduced it in a book they wrote in 2002. The web site of Braungart’s Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency describes the C2C concept.

In nature, a fruit tree puts out blossoms in the spring. By the fall, the blossoms have turned to seed-bearing fruit. Some of the fruit and leaves become food for other creatures. Then everything drops off the tree branches and rots. One way or another, everything returns to nature. Only some small number of those seeds become new trees. It doesn’t seem a very efficient way to make trees, but it works well. Nothing becomes a waste.

C2C envisions two ways of imitating this cycle. Organic products return to nature as compost at the end of their useful life. That requires that they can contain no toxic chemicals that would harm the biosphere. Inorganic products use only materials that can be reprocessed in some kind of new product. Both the biological and technical cycles use only renewable energy.

This reprocessing is not the same as recycling.  Recycling entails making something new from waste materials. The new materials nearly always represent some kind of downcycling. Making anything like the original product still requires virgin materials. While in principle, everything is recyclable, in practice much must be landfilled.

Implementation of C2C depends in part on a database of materials that designates some as acceptable for use and rejects others entirely. Also, as with the leased washing machine, design principles exclude any part of the product from becoming waste. Manufacturing operations can get analyses of their processes and receive certification for offering C2C products.

The evolution of environmental consciousness

For most of human history, no one much cared about toxicity or other dangers of making products or their raw materials. Metal work, for example, has always required mining and refining of ores, processes inherently dangerous to workers. Only recently has humanity learned of the inherent toxicity of materials like mercury or lead.

The Industrial Revolution brought great material gains and prosperity for society as a whole, but it had a price. Its procedures polluyted air and water beyond their capacity to purify themselves.

In the US, the environmental movement traces its roots to wilderness conservation. Conservationists largely wanted to protect hunting and fishing interests against dams and other large-scale engineering projects. It was a long, lonely fight.

After the Second World War, food safety and hazardous insecticides became important public issues. Some of the older conservation groups recognized the need for expanding the issues they advocated. People active in these issues began to prefer to call themselves environmentalists instead of conservationists.

By 1970, protecting the environment had become a safe political issue. No one wanted to be identified as opposing it. In that context Earth Day (April 22, 1970) succeeded beyond its sponsors’ wildest imagination. It has become an annual event, not only in the US, but internationally.

Quite apart from the inevitable political backlash, the limitations of environmentalism soon became apparent. It depended too much on legislation and regulation. It failed to provide guidance for how individuals and organizations could do their part.

A new concept, sustainability, emerged. It was no longer enough to ask how the government could protect the environment. Sustainability considers how we can voluntarily adopt materials and practices that will meet present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Limits of sustainability

Large corporations, including Walmart, have aggressively redesigned everything from manufacturing processes to packaging to delivery routes. They want to minimize waste, among other things.

Consumers now have choices to buy products like recycled paper and non-toxic cleaning supplies. Individuals and businesses alike can divert at least some of the waste stream to recycling facilities. Some state and local governments have made recycling mandatory. But for the most part, the progress of sustainability doesn’t depend on laws and regulation. People and organizations voluntarily act in what seems to them like the best interest of both themselves and the environment.

What could be wrong with that?

For one thing, recycling isn’t working very well. For another, Seventh Generation, a leading manufacturer of eco-friendly products, fired its CEO Jeffrey Hollander in 2011. One reason? He hadn’t created a truly sustainable brand. Just because “green” products are less bad than conventional products does not make them good.

But here may be the biggest hurdle: Too many environmentalists still advocate for sustainability in terms of communal sacrifice. They scold and try to motivate others by guilt. Reduction of environmental impact seems to require rejection of technology. Growth seems like a bad thing. Who can expect society as a whole to buy into a concept based on such negativity?

Is Cradle to Cradle the next logical step?

McDonough and Braungart avoid the negativity and exude optimism over design concepts that mimic natural processes. Their writings and speeches inspire many. It appears, however, that none of the projects they brag about have succeeded as much as they claim.

For one thing, they hitched their visionary design principles to very traditional and rigid ideas of intellectual property. They want to produce a database of acceptable manufacturing materials comparable in scope with the Human Genome Project. What is the benefit in giving their company the data necessary to compile such a database and then not being able to use it?

They finally spun off control of their certification program to a non-profit corporation. When I viewed that web site on November 8, 2018, it had 540 certifications of 8,000 products. In contrast, the U.S. Green Building Council oversees Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). There are more than ten times as many LEED-certified buildings as C2C-certified products.

It takes more than slogans and speeches for a concept to become successful. Others besides Braungart and McDonough are working on designing an entire product life cycle. I expect many of their ideas to become mainstream. I have no such expectation for their certification program.

And as for that leasable washing machine? I wish I had phones that worked as dependably as the ones I had with the old Bell System. If one of them stopped working, I could turn it in for another. Now, I just have electronic junk to discard.

It’s a great dream. Maybe someone will figure out how to make it work.

Sources:

Before and after the first Earth Day, 1970 / David M. Guion. Amazon Kindle/Create Space
Green guru gone wrong: William McDonough / Danielle Sacks, Fast Company. November 1, 2008
Industrial Revolution: take two / Matt Tyrnauer, Vanity Fair. June 12, 2010