Recently I read Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. These whacky authors presents a truly mind expanding way to approach the design of products. They discuss at some length the differences between two approaches to sustainable design, eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness.Eco-efficiency is sustainable design of the sort that a majority of companies practice currently. It is product and process design intended to do less bad or to clean up the act a bit. Eco-efficient designers look around the factory and find places and processes where they can cut waste, use recycled cardboard for packaging, recycle offcuts, use less water or change paint suppliers to acquire lower VOC coatings. It searches through the lens of efficiency, for materials and processes that are less bad. While these efficiencies result in slower environmental degradation, the key words here are less, bad and slower. The trouble with the eco-efficiency model is that in the end, it does nothing to stop products from moving to the landfill. It only provides a way to imbue raw materials with a couple more incarnations and slow the inevitable trip to the earthy, landfill grave. If you have read my previous article on 10,000 Year Thinking you will understand that this is a temporary solution at best.
One of the largest issues with eco-efficient design is the little understood reality that recycled materials are are not really recycled but down-cycled. To see this, think of the case of an aluminum can; the top of the can is a high grade aluminum while the can body is a lower grade. When dutifully recycled and the two grades are melted together, they combine to form a lower grade than required for the tops. Mixing varying grade materials of any kind results in this problem. When regular steels are combined with stainless steel in the recycling process, or when painted auto body panels are re-melted, the combined materials are unable to be used in higher level applications any longer because of the degraded quality of the combination. An additional problem. Paints on steel often contain harmful materials that are released to the atmosphere when melted or are bound into items produced using recycled steel. This potentially results in exposing people to toxins in a way never intended by a product's original designer or the new designer utilizing materials with recycled content.
In describing the vision of eco-effective design on the other hand, the authors present the image of a cherry tree spewing thousands of blossoms and point to the great excess of this event. All that spewing, simply to spawn a single tree. Yet there is no waste in that process because all parts of the blossoms that do not become trees, become food in the local biological closed loop. The natural loop where waste from one living thing in the biosphere automatically becomes food for another. The authors suggest using the same loop model, along with a switch in thinking among designers, to create a similar closed loop in the technical or manufacturing sphere. A loop where products at the end of useful life are reclaimed to extract and reuse materials at the same or even higher level, to become food if you will, for continuing the technological loop. Two separate abundantly producing loops; one biological, one technological. Both being fed by materials already within each system.
If designers are able to create ideal products where the product and packaging at the end of use become food for either the biological loop or the technological loop, humans can continue to manufacture and consume at almost any rate that we wish. You can have the new car, phone or chair anytime you want if all the components of the old one can be simply reformed into a newer one of the same quality. As long as we keep our designs easily de-constructible so that each component is food for either the biological or technological loop we will have no future resource problem.
There is of course, much more to this book than the nutshell presented here and it is an important read for anyone concerned with environmentally responsible design issues. Although the authors seem to ignore the energy requirements of their proposed system, the book has provided food for my biological looping brain.
Using these ideas, I am sure, will generate copious loopiness of another sort. Please check back soon.
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