By William McDonough & Michael Braungart

Fundamental design book for sustainable design. A triple bottom line text.

We can make as much as we want of anything we want as long as the materials and systems are infinitely cycled and that all Waste = Food for the next processes.

Biological Nutrient vs. Technical Nutrient

From Sustainaspeak:

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

— R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb: Environment and Man's Future

Waste equals Food, whether it is food for the Earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

— William McDonough

Pollution is a symbol of design failure

— William McDonough & Michael Braungart

We live in a throwaway economy in which finite resources are being wasted. More and more resources are being extracted from the Earth's crust, while requiring more and more energy in the production, processing, manufacturing, transportation, and disposing of these materials. Buckminster referred to not harvesting our valuable and wasted resources as a type of pollution. Our products purchased are just the tip of a vast pile of extracted resources, carbon-emitting fuel, and toxic wastes, and are often the products of unfair labor practices.

The potential for reducing material use in modern industrial economies by using only one-fourth of the virgin raw materials and still functioning very efficiently was recognized in Germany in the 1990s by Schmidt-Bleek and von Weizsäcker, who called this potential resource reduction Factor 4.

Material use reduction begins with recycling, which also generates tremendous energy savings, reduces carbon emissions, reduces air and water pollution, and slashes the size of our growing landfills. The steel discarded each year is enough to meet the needs of the U.S. auto industry. Steel made from recycled scrap metal takes only 26% as much energy as that from iron ore. A recycled aluminum can saves 95% of the energy of making a new can. Steel and aluminum can be recycled indefinitely (provided impurities are kept to a minimum). Recycled plastic uses only 20% of the energy, and recycled paper uses only 64% as much energy and far fewer chemicals for processing (Brown 2009, p.98).

Conventional product designs have limited reusability, and are called cradle to grave products (AKA Take, Make, Waste or Linear Economy). Product systems need to be designed as nature-mimicking to support reuse in regenerative products and services much like nature's larger system where all materials are nutrients in nature's processes. McDonough and Braungart conclude that waste and pollution need to be avoided entirely and everything we own should be recycled, remade, or buried in the ground to compost. They call for waste-free closed-loop life-cycles that recycles outputs and byproducts of one process as inputs for another such that "Waste = Food" in efficient manufacturing practices. The C2C protocol is a voluntary sustainable product certification that guarantees products are high-performing, efficient, and harmless to nature and human body balances.

See also:

• Biomimicry
• Closed-Loop
• Deconstruction
• Design for Disassembly
• Downcycling
• Factor 4
• Factor 10
• Green Economy
• Industrial Ecology
• Regenerative Design
• Upcycling
• Zero Waste

Further Sources:

• Benyus (1997)
• Brown (2009)
• Zbicinski, et al. (2006)