SBS Television screened a fantastic documentary a couple of weeks ago, which I have only just gotten around to watching, called "Waste = Food: Our Furture and the Making of Things". Industrial designer and architect William McDonough and his collegue German eco-toxicologist Michael Braungart, have taken the concept of
minimising industrial waste and turned it on it's head, by radically redesigning industrial processes using the "
cradle to cradle" strategy (C2C), whereby each individual component of an item (be it a car, chair or shoe), can be dissassembled at the end of the product's life, and either be reused or "upcycled" into new products, i.e. little or no quality is lost in the recycling process, unlike paper for example. In the same way that in the garden, waste organic materials can be remade into compost to feed the plants, McDonough and Braungart redesign systems such that the industrial waste can be remade into new items, thereby eliminating "traditional" waste altogether (the concept is call "biomimicry"). In addition, by-products of the manufacturing process can be fed into the natural world cycle, hence the philosophy where "waste = food", both literally and figuratively.
One of the examples of a system that the pair redesigned was a textile factory in Germany. The old factory had enormous toxic waste issues: the new factory used new non-toxic dyes and produced a waste material used as biodegradable mulch matting on nearby farms. Another example was their design ice cream packaging that is solid when frozen but a biodegradable liquid at room temperature (and is impregnated with plant seeds!). How "cool" ;-)
The pair have also released a book called
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, outlining this strategy; the pages are made of recyclable plastic, and the non-toxic ink is designed to wash off in hot water.
All absolutely fascinating stuff, and I have to say that unlike many recent docos that have left me feeling quite depressed about the sate of our planet, this one left me feeling positive about our future for a change :-) If you haven't seen it, see if you can hold of a copy of the book somewhere - I'll be looking for it at my local library this weekend!
2 comments:
Hi there! You'd probably also be interested in Pulse, which references Cradle to Cradle, and expands on a whole lot of related ideas. It seemed to really synthesise a lot of the thinking our blog network has touched on, and it offers some hope to boot.
Better yet, you can read it online at www.pulsethebook.com
One of the things it considers is the role of energy in the whole equation. Lots is usually required to remanufacture things (even upcycle things) on a large scale. So unless we're talking about artisanally crafted post-consumer products, there's still significant wastage (of energy) involved.
Thanks mandarina, I've bookmarked that site so I can read it at leisure later, it looks really interesting :-) Now I just need an extra 5 hours a day to get through all the reading I want to do!
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