Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats

An Abundance of Adaptation

A look into the natural world leaves one astonished at the abundance of diversity that surrounds us.  After four billion years of natural design, we find ourselves in the presence of an astounding array of adaptable solutions to life on planet Earth.  Each species, after millions of years of trial-by-fire evolution, has come to embody an innovative solution.  Responding to unique local conditions, ants, for example, have evolved into nearly 10,000 species, several hundred of which can be found in the crown of a single Amazonian tree. Not only is the variety impressive but the solutions themselves, as well.  Fruit trees produce thousands of blossoms – an astonishing abundance of blossoms – so that another tree might germinate, take root and grow. 

Humans have shown the same extravagant diversity in their adaptations to life on Earth.  Cultures and religions across the world carry the same amazing display of creativity and ingenuity.  We built not just shelter, but beautiful, elegant responses to locale; the breathing, shade-providing Bedouin tent along with the ornate, aspiring temples of cool, coastal Japan. We designed not just wraps against the wind but tailored garments for ritual, celebration, and our own delight. We spoke and moved not just for utilitarian ends but to make drama and poetry, Balinese dance and Shakespearean verse—human creations stoking the fire.

Commerce has exemplified these same human traits as well.  However, in the past 150 years “brute force” has more often than “elegant design” been the answer. Powered by new fossil-fuel technology, humankind has rocketed into an ubiquitous presence across the world.  But the making and trading of goods can still be a wellspring of creativity, productivity, and pleasure. Think of the thriving marketplaces that have enlivened the world’s great cities, the cherished objects and materials that transform shelter into soulful dwelling. These two aspects of our lives are not at odds.  On the contrary, human industry and habitations can be designed to celebrate interdependence with other living systems, transforming the making and consumption of things into a regenerative force. Design can perform and preserve the extravagant gesture—in the marketplace, in the human community, and in the natural world.

An Age of Limits?

Adherents of the sustainable design movement may cringe at the suggestion that human industry can be a regenerative force.  For some, such a notion is downright heretical.  Our time is widely perceived as an age of limits. Many believe we live in a world where each natural resource we use brings us one step closer to running out, and the world’s developed nations are damaging Earth’s ecosystems irreparably and consigning the Third World to poverty.

In the face of this limited world we live in, we all try to limit our impact. “Reduce, reuse, and recycle” are the slogans of the eco-efficient movement.  We use less of anything we can: water, gas, paper, packaging.  Business leaders and designers strive to “produce more with less,” “minimize waste” and release fewer toxic chemicals into the air, water, and soil.  While these actions are an admirable first step, they fail to provide a viable solution, because they don’t get to the root of the problem.  If one is ill, is it better to treat the symptoms or the cause of the illness?  Working within the same system without examining the manifest flaws in its design, eco-efficiency fails to resolves the issues arising from human industry’s interaction with the environment.  It reforms industry without truly reshaping the way products are made and used. In effect, industry is simply using brute force more efficiently to overcome the rules of the natural world. Without radical innovations, we will forever be caught dealing with the same problems. 

By following the 3 Rs of eco-efficiency, one might feel a bit “less bad”, but no matter how little a person uses, he or she will always be consuming something.  No one can quite slip the trap of being merely a “consumer” in a world of poorly designed, toxic products. Every choice seems to contribute to the erosion of human and environmental health: the carpet makes your children sick; the car burns too much gas; the TV is loaded with toxic materials. When anything you buy does damage to the world, consumption remains freighted with anxiety and divorced from any notion of sustainability—not to mention pleasure and delight.

Industry, meanwhile, slogs ahead under regulations that merely dilute pollution rather than examine the cause of the problem; regulations are in fact signals of design failure and, ultimately, licenses to harm. And efficiency is proving to fall short of its goals. Pollution and waste in Austria, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States have increased by as much as 28 percent in the last 25 years despite increasingly efficient use of resources. Even sustainability appears not to be sustainable.

Innovation

Our question remains: how can industry and nature fruitfully co-exist?  The prevalent solution today, eco-efficiency, seems to be falling short of the goal. Let us consider the cherry tree: Each spring it produces thousands of blossoms, only a few of which germinate, take root and grow. Out of thousands of blossoms, only a handful achieve their intended goal, but who would see cherry blossoms piling up on the ground and think, “How inefficient and wasteful”? The tree’s abundance is useful and safe. Perhaps the intended goal of a blossom is not simply to reproduce as we would imagine.  After falling to the ground, the blossoms return to the soil and become nutrients for the surrounding environment. Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem. Waste does not exist. Instead, waste nourishes; waste equals food.

Not only as it blossoms does a cherry tree support its surroundings.  Throughout its life and afterwards, it provides sustenance as well.  Through photosynthesis it makes food from the sun, providing sustenance for animals, birds and microorganisms. It sequesters carbon, produces oxygen and filters water. The tree’s limbs and leaves harbour a great diversity of microbes and insects, all of which play a role within a local system of natural cycles. Even in death the tree provides nourishment as it decomposes and releases minerals that fuel new life. From blossom to sapling to magnificent old age, the cherry tree’s growth is regenerative. We could say its life cycle is Cradle to Cradle—after each useful life it provides nourishment for something new. In a Cradle to Cradle world—a world of natural cycles powered by the sun—growth is good, waste nutritious, and nature’s diverse responses to place are the source of intelligent design.

In typical human industry, on the other hand, materials tend to flow from cradle to grave. Generally, the production and consumption of goods follows a one-way, linear path from the factory to the household to the landfill or incinerator. Wasted materials and harmful emissions trail products from the cradle of the industrial plant to the grave of the local dump. Recycling and regulation are often employed to minimize the negative impacts of industry. While they do help ease the conflict between nature and commerce, why not set out, right from the start, to create products and industrial systems that have only positive, regenerative impacts on the world? Why fine-tune a damaging system when we can create a world of commerce that we can celebrate and unabashedly applaud?

Commerce worth applauding applies nature’s cycles to the making of things. It generates safe, ecologically intelligent products that, like the cherry tree, provide nourishment for something new after each useful life. From a design perspective, this means creating products that work within Cradle to Cradle life cycles rather than cradle-to-grave ones. It means rather than designing products to be used and thrown away, we begin to imitate nature’s highly effective systems and design every product as a nutrient.

What is a nutritious product? It’s not simply an all-natural product; it’s not a recycled product, either. Instead, it’s a product designed to provide nutrients to what we have conceived as the Earth’s two discrete metabolisms: the biological metabolism and the technical metabolism.  Most packaging, for example, could be designed for the biological metabolism.  If the packaging is made from organic materials, it can safely decompose, returning nutrients to the soil after its use.  Products that do not decompose in the environment, like synthetic materials, chemicals, metals and durable goods, are part of the technical metabolism.  They can be designed to circulate in industrial cycles so that these valuable materials are reclaimed rather than thrown away.  In effect, these are technical nutrients providing “food” for the “technosphere”.

Cars, computer cases, washing machines, televisions—in fact, all industrial products—can be designed to retain value as they pass between producer and consumer. When products are recycled, the materials often lose their initial value.  Soda cans, for example, contain different metals that, when blended together in recycling, result in a less valuable mix.  By designing products to flow as technical nutrients, materials can retain their discrete value.  Customers will soon be able to buy the service of such goods, and manufacturers will take them back at the customers’ request, using their complex materials in the product’s next high-value iteration. Many products of service, from air conditioners to carpets, are already on the market.

When products from either the biological metabolism or the technical metabolism take a one-way trip to the landfill, a great wealth of nutrients is squandered. Trapped in a plastic-lined dump, organic waste cannot renew the soil and valuable technical materials are lost forever. Worse, the two discrete metabolisms are mixed, contaminating both: Nature, by design, cannot safely absorb the materials of industry and industry has little or no use for organic nutrients. But if the things people make are channeled into one or the other of these metabolisms, then products can be safely manufactured and consumed without straining the environment. They can be considered either biological nutrients or technical nutrients, both of which provide nourishment within their respective spheres of nature and industry.

We’d like to see a true transformation of commerce in which design goes beyond using nature efficiently and instead creates value and opportunity with products that nourish rather than deplete the world. This is not to gainsay efficiency. We’d simply like to put efficiency to work in the service of an effective, life-centered vision.

From Maintenance to Renewal

The conceptual, and actual, shift to Cradle to Cradle products transforms the impact of industry. When all manufactured products and materials are designed as nutrients, the production and consumption of goods enriches the natural world. And when those nutrients flow within coherent cycles, human industry and human desires can become the cherry tree, writ large.

Fanciful? Not at all. The leaders of companies all over the world have begun to move from the maintenance of the old industrial system to a renewal of commerce. They have decided to recognize the far-reaching influence of their creative acts and celebrate their impact on the world rather than disguise it. They have launched the Next Industrial Revolution.

The textile industry, led by DesignTex in 1993, has already developed examples of a biological nutrient—a product so safe you could literally eat it. The carpet industry, meanwhile, has adopted the product of service idea and is focusing its business on the concept that carpet can be a technical nutrient retrieved again and again from loyal customers. Both are working to keep their respective materials in coherent, truly cyclical flows. Companies such as Milliken, Collins & Aikman, and Interface—major commercial carpet companies—are all putting forward their products as materials designed for reclamation. They are telling their customers they want to replace used carpets with new ones and retrieve their technical nutrients. In effect, the companies continue to own the carpet material but lease and maintain it while a customer uses the carpet in their building. When the carpet eventually wears out, the manufacturer will reuse its materials at their original level of quality or a higher one.

DesignTex, on the other hand, has created an upholstery fabric that flows in the biological metabolism. The company set out to create a product that was beautiful, durable, and ecologically intelligent. After an assiduous design process, they decided on a wool-ramie blend that could be removed from the frame of a chair after its useful life and tossed onto the ground to naturally decompose. To ensure that the fabric would safely biodegrade, the design team considered more than 8,000 chemicals used in the textile industry to finish and dye natural fabrics.  The dyes were evaluated to determine their constituents.  Most contained some form of mutagen, carcinogen, heavy metal, endocrine disruptor, or bio-accumulative substance, but 38 were found to be suitable for a material destined to be food for the soil. The final outcome was pleasing: a gorgeous, affordable fabric that would one day be mulch for the local garden club. But the design process also yielded another very positive, if unintended, effect. When regulators tested the water flowing out from the Swiss mill that produced the DesignTex fabric, they thought their instruments were broken. When they tested the water flowing in they found that their equipment was working fine—water coming out of the factory was cleaner than the water going in. The manufacturing process itself was filtering the water.  The manufacturer was able eliminate risks associated with handling dangerous chemicals and renovate the resulting extra space into staff offices and a lounge.

The Creation of Community Wealth

A textile mill that purifies water begins to suggest the profound impact intelligent design can have on communities. Just as a product designed as a biological nutrient nourishes a community of microorganisms in the soil, a factory and its manufacturing processes can be designed to address a broad range of local concerns, from the desire for a convivial, productive workplace to the health of the environment to the creation of community wealth.

Design creates an environment for a community. A factory designed to nourish a community of workers, for example, can build stronger ties between colleagues by creating pleasant, healthy places for them to work, meet and enjoy each other’s company. That’s a laudable intention for workplace design, but it cannot be the only intention. The work community extends beyond the workplace and includes all species that inhabit the locale—not just the human community. When designers are mindful of all inhabitants, their goals change dramatically. Suddenly, the availability of sunlight, shade and water, the subtleties of climate and terrain, the health of local birds, flowers and grasses all become fundamental to design. Buildings become responsive to place.

Herman Miller, the furniture manufacturer, took that principle to heart when it commissioned the design of a 295,000 square foot factory and office near its headquarters in western Michigan. The company’s goals for the new plant were to foster a spirit of collaboration between office and factory workers, and create a workplace with a restorative impact on the local environment.  The design team carefully considered the factory’s unique locale.  With an innovative design that celebrated an array of natural and cultural delights, Herman Miller built a plant that serves the needs of all its factory workers and administrative employees.

The low-lying, curved building follows the natural contours of the Michigan grassland. Storm water spilling off the building moves off the site through an extended series of wetlands that purify the water while providing habitat for hundreds of species of birds, plants and insects. Plantings of native grasses and trees provided additional habitat for local creatures and further enhance the beauty of the site. Inside the building, offices face the manufacturing plant across a sun-lit, urbane promenade where workers meet and lunch and drink coffee among whimsical sculptures and thriving plants. The entire building—the gyms, the bathrooms, the factory floor—is so pleasantly bright and airy, it is now known as “the greenhouse.”

Does this enhance the well-being of workers while creating productivity and wealth? Absolutely. When Herman Miller moved into the building, the company was producing $250 million worth of furniture each year. Within a single year it increased production by nearly $50 million, a gain of 24 percent. At the same time, both office and manufacturing staff reported a significantly higher degree of job satisfaction than they had at their previous workplaces. Herman Miller credits these positive changes to three things: the customized design of the factory, which suited their administrative and manufacturing needs; an innovative management strategy designed to enhance relationships with customers; and the simple fact that the building is such a bright, pleasant place to work.

While it’s impossible to measure the influence of delight, its easy to imagine the pleasure of working in a place where you can always see the beauty of the surrounding landscape, where copious fresh air and light actually blur the boundary between indoors and out. Workers in such a place feel as if they have spent the entire day outdoors. They see the comings and goings of birds and the passing of the seasons. They come to know the place where they live—at work! Such pleasures have an enormous impact on the spirit. After Herman Miller moved into the new plant, sixteen young employees left for jobs with higher wages--but they soon returned. When the president of the company asked, “Why are you back?” they said, “We want our jobs back because we had never worked in another factory before. We couldn’t work in the dark.”

When a company decides to create a workplace where employees can work in the light, it has given itself the opportunity to re-think everything under the sun; it is making a decision that will ripple through all its endeavors and through the life of the community it inhabits. It is, in effect, making a profound declaration: we are native to this place.

A New Global Perspective

The fact that a global company can achieve positive local effects is a very critical issue for us. In our minds, all sustainability is local. On one level, that suggests a rich engagement with one’s place, an attitude toward design that draws information and inspiration from the nearby living world. But it can also mean that one develops an appreciation for the distant effects of local actions.

When the leader of a large corporation, for example, examines her company’s role in the world, she might do so from the narrow perspective of her office. Or she might see that when her decisions initiate labor and create products well beyond her region, they have an impact on a distant place that can only be understood in its local context; what is sustainable in Los Angeles may not be sustainable in Kerala—or even in New York. An executive might do nothing with this knowledge, or if she aspires to a sustaining vision, she might begin to take many places into account in her decisions and, in fact, even seek to enrich many places.

Former World Bank economist Herman Daly has approached this idea from a global economic perspective. He makes a distinction between globalization, a system of uniform rules for the entire world, and internationalization, the increasing importance of relations and trade between nations. While internationalization preserves the identities of nations as it embraces international commerce and communications, in a globalizing economy, says Daly, “what was many becomes one.”

From a design perspective, a set of uniform rules for the entire world suggests an erosion of cultural diversity. Applying one-size-fits all design solutions to architecture, for example, yields bland, uniform buildings isolated from the particularities of place—from local culture and nature, from energy and material flows. Such buildings, quite common today in cities all over the world, reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style, excluding the possibility for unique, extravagant expressions of humanity.

Consider French cheese. Charles DeGaulle is said to have remarked that it was difficult to rule a country that produced 2000 different kinds of cheese. But should political efficiency overrun diversity? What if the many cheeses of France were to become one? Perhaps that’s why the French farm activist Jose Bove drove his tractor into the McDonald’s in his village: the thought of such a France was just too much to bear.

But there’s a flip side to the global economy—international trade allows us to experience and celebrate the fullness and diversity of life on Earth. Isn’t it to be expected that one might go to a place like New York to sample the delicacies of Italy and China and Istanbul, all of which are the result of intensely local events? Who would choose to live without Parma’s cheeses and hams?

Not the members of Slow Food, an Italian movement working to preserve regional culture with the tools of the global economy. Employing what the movement’s founder Carlo Petrini calls “virtuous globalization”– a savvy use of global communications to identify international markets for local food producers. Slow Food, writes author Alexander Stille, “has taken up the defense of the purple asparagus of Albegna, the black celery of Trevi, the Vesuvian apricot, the long-tailed sheep of Laticauda…and a host of endangered handmade cheeses and salamis known now only to a handful of old farmers.”

With the help of Slow Food’s commercial ventures—a guide to local wine and restaurants and a biennial food show—Italian farmers, beekeepers, millers and vintners are staying in business. A once struggling miller in the small town of Bra, for example, now has all he can do to keep up with orders for his flour.  That’s the beauty of Slow Food: a global network that produces local wealth through a celebration of the pleasures of fine food.

Corporations could also practice virtuous globalization. They might begin by designing products, manufacturing systems and workplaces that fit locale. Imagine a global company creating value by applying a high international standard of scientific inquiry—a common tool of corporate research—at the local level, addressing basic needs like nutrition, soil chemistry or clean water. A prototypical product of consumption such as soap might allow them to do so.

Currently, soap is mass produced and shipped all over the world in a one-size-fits-all solution to a common need. Detergents are designed to lather up, remove dirt and kill germs anywhere from Brooklyn to Bangkok. Rather than respond to the different washing methods and water chemistries that occur from place to place, manufacturers simply add more chemical force to override local conditions.

That’s hardly a benign choice. Though detergent makers proudly announce that their products are “phosphate free,” they are not free of other harmful chemicals. The industrial strength required to make a soap work against any contingency makes even a small dose of detergent a potent pollutant. In combination with other chemicals in the waste stream, detergents flow into the watershed, diluted but far from safe. The health of rivers and streams, the lives of fish and aquatic plants, the quality of drinking water all take a beating.

There is another way to satisfy the need for clean water and clean clothes. Rather than impose a universal product on markets all over the world, a soap manufacturer might apply sophisticated technology and expertise in chemistry to the development of detergents that are not only safe everywhere—utterly free of harmful chemicals—but suited to a variety of locales. Soaps for hard water, soaps for soft water, soaps for washing clothes on riverside rocks. Soap could also be locally produced and sold in biodegradable packaging designed to be food for the soil or in cookie-sized discs, eliminating packaging altogether. With these innovations, growing organically out of years of research and development, this global company would have developed soaps suitable to locale, designed dangerous chemicals out of their product, built an effective delivery system, eliminated waste, protected local waters from pollution and provided food for local soils. Not bad for laundry detergent.

Many products of consumption are ripe for innovations that will have positive impacts on communities all over the world. A packaging manufacturer could design a biodegradable food container for markets in China, where the disposal of Styrofoam has become a national problem. In India, where waste is often burned for fuel, plastic beverage bottles could be produced with new polymers free of dangerous toxins—such as the heavy metal antimony—that are commonly released when incinerated.  Human creativity and ingenuity need only be turned towards the creation of intelligent, innovative products. 

In Praise of Dirty Clothes: Design and the Renewal of Everyday Life

If we look at things as simple as soap and water in the context of the daily life of a community, we can begin to see some of the delightful, far-reaching effects of the Next Industrial Revolution.

Imagine for a moment a community that wants to re-invent itself. After an arduous but exciting round of public meetings, the town’s citizens have decided that they want to renew the community’s connection to the natural world while restoring the best qualities of a healthy small town. Along with planning to preserve a vibrant commercial district, mixed-use neighborhoods, walkable streets and lots of parks and playgrounds, the town has also identified the need for a variety of new social venues. Many of these new venues, it is hoped, will bring the generations together in places that are pleasing to inhabit during the daily round of errands and chores. In effect, the community wants to take down the fence between commerce, local culture and the natural world.

One of their new venues is a community service center operated as a viable business by retired citizens. The center is comprised of a laundromat, day care service, a health clinic and a mobility service. It is housed in an old Victorian mansion that shares a tree-lined street with other homes and businesses. Once the mayor’s residence, the 100-year old house has been restored and adapted, preserving its basic structure—sharply pitched gables and wrap-around porch—while using new technology to create energy systems powered by the sun, earth and wind. In fact, high-tech glass, daylighting, photovoltaic panels, and a wind turbine allow the house to operate without a drop of fossil fuel. In a series of indoor botanical gardens and outdoor ponds, wastewater and storm water treatment is also managed on-site.

Along with the energy and water treatment systems, the old house has received another new addition: a two-story meeting place lit by the sun, a kind of greenhouse commons where elders and infants, parents and teenagers gather at the hub of the neighborhood center. While mothers sit and talk over coffee, enjoying the view of the big, old backyard oaks, a pair of older men relax in the warm sun while waiting for their appointments at the clinic. Others wait to catch the elevator to an underground garage, where a small fleet of community cars awaits.

The community cars are products of service built from reclaimed materials and powered by renewable energy. They are operated by the community’s retired citizens, who drop children off at the middle school athletic field, help others pick up laundry, and assist people going to their appointments at the health clinic. The fleet allows most people to keep their cars off the road while giving community car drivers opportunities share their vast accumulated wisdom.

Back at the laundromat, business is brisk and profitable. Most people in the community have chosen not to purchase the service of a washing machine from a manufacturer and instead have their laundry picked up each week. The washing machines are humming—humming with energy provided by the sun and cleaning clothes with detergent that is not simply phosphate-free but completely harmless to the natural world. After each wash, wastewater spills into the indoor botanical gardens—creating heat—and then flows outdoors through a constructed wetland, in each case providing food for local flowers and plants. By design, the community center has become a vibrant habitat. Like a tree it makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, purifies water, makes complex sugars and food, and creates a restoring environment for the community to gather.

From the folding tables in the laundromat, the views are gorgeous. An elderly gentleman gazes out over the hilly town and after carefully folding a pile of clothes, he visits the day care center, where he pauses to watch his grandson play outdoors with the other neighborhood children. He is aware, in the midst of a simple chore, that he lives in a place blessed with an abundance of community wealth.

This is just one example of the many ways in which eco-effective design can transform the experience of everyday life. It suggests how seemingly extravagant gestures—a beautiful social venue for the eldest and the youngest, botanical gardens for purifying water—can add up to a deep sense of community wealth.

Set in the world most of us live in today, such a scenario is shot through with things we might lament, from the impact of fossil fuel burning automobiles to the pollution of our rivers and streams to the clear sense that today’s industrial strategies will never deliver a high standard of living to all the world’s people. But a different world is in our grasp. Indeed, what we are seeking is a transformation of culture, a strategy of change that allows all of our children to live in a world of hope.

Prof. Dr. Michael Braungart

DR. BRAUNGART is a chemist and founder of EPEA International Umweltforschung GmbH, in Hamburg, Germany, and co-founder of MBDC, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both EPEA and MBDC share a common set of values that embrace intelligent, aesthetic and eco-effective design, and seek to optimize products through a Cradle to Cradle framework. Through these activities, Prof. Braungart has developed tools to design eco-effective products and business systems, and has worked with a number of organizations and companies in a range of industries. Since 1994, he has been a professor of Process Engineering at the University Lüneburg, Germany, also serving as director of an interdisciplinary materials flow management masters program. Recently, he accepted a visiting professorship at the Darden School of Business, lecturing on such topics as eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness, Cradle-to-Cradle design and Intelligent Materials Pooling.

http://www.braungart.com/