Cradle to Cradle

[ceelove]

There's been a lot going on for me internally, lots of processing and re-evaluating, coinciding with a recent birthday. It is, though, perhaps better expressed in person; I'm not sure I can even write about it. Meanwhile, I've still got a couple of posts grumbling at me about being unwritten. So, here's a book that really made me sit up and take notice, a couple of months ago.

William McDonough and Michael Braungart come from very eclectic, varied backgrounds. This explains in part how broad in scope their observations and ideas are. The basic underlying premise of their book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, is that we are going to have to think much farther out of the box, much further into the future, than we currently are, to solve our environmental problems long term.

It is not a scolding book, nor a gloomy one, but an optomistic and creative one; still, it does paint a rather terrifying picture of how dangerous an environment we are currently creating for ourselves. To quote an early paragraph, "That plastic rattle the baby is playing with - should she be putting it in her mouth? If it's made of PVC plastic, there's a good chance it contains phthalates, known to cause liver cancer in animals (and suspected to cause endocrine disruption), along with toxic dyes, lubricants, antioxidants, and ultraviolent-light stabilizers. Why? What were the designers at the toy company thinking?" Well, obviously this question hit me rather hard; and, frankly, it got across to me things that starphire had been trying to communicate all along, that one cannot assume that things made for children are safe for them.

So do we not give the child a toy? Do we not make the toy? No, says Cradle to Cradle, we make the toy out of materials that are safe for the child to interact with.

But what about the fact that it's still trash, after it gets broken or outmoded or whatever? It's nice if I got it as a hand-me-down, and if I can pass it along the line afterwards, but eventually it's going to end up in a landfill - or, worse, burned, which will release toxic chemicals into the air. The toy was never designed to be anything more than a single-life item. It needs to be designed to be fully recyclable: not as an afterthought, not "downcycled" into a subsequent single-use item (of lower-quality material), but as a material that can be safely and efficiently used and re-used and re-re-used.

And what of the process by which the toy is made? One of the most shocking facts for me to absorb in here, of many shocking facts, was that the toy only represents about five percent of the materials used and discarded, in its making. I am unconsciously throwing away twenty times as much as I directly use, which is a phenomenal amount of waste. The process needs to be re-envisioned, the book contends. We need to copy nature's processes, wherein waste equals food.

It all gets more complicated from there, and I can imagine rereading this book (which, slow and picky reader that I am, I very rarely do) to better imprint the ideas on me. If you'd like to borrow it in the meantime, speak up. It will hold up to many readings: it's not actually made of paper, is waterproof, and is the only book I have unhesitatingly let Sylvana play with.