| Why Cradle To Cradle Recycling Is The Future |
We advocate and practice the three R's - "reduce, reuse, recycle" to reduce the negative effect of our wasteful way of life and frivolous products on nature, and then we step back, smugly content in the belief that when we go green we're making the right choice. And why not? We've just helped reduce the volume of solid waste that's going to end up in our landfills (or worse, in the oceans), we've done our part in helping protect the environment.
But, are we really choosing the best option when we recycle?
Have you heard of the book called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things" by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, published in 2002? In this ground-breaking book, they point out that recycling, as it is practiced today, is in reality "downcycling" or "cradle to grave" recycling. We craft wall insulation from styrofoam or produce news print out of white paper. The new products we fashion out of used materials are invariably inferior to the original (because of materials degradation or contamination) or use just a fraction of it (the remainder ending up in the dump sites as toxic waste).
No such excess in nature. How many cones does a pine tree have to produce for a new pine tree to flourish? A thousand, probably tens of thousands. All for a solitary new baby pine tree. Are those hundred other cones or seeds that failed to become new trees wasted? Of course, not. They all fall to the earth and biodegrade to become nutrients to help in the pine tree's next reproduction cycle. Nature shows sustainable cycles, such as that of the pine tree, all the time. Nothing in nature is wasted, every seed or cone ultimately helps to perpetuate the cycle that gets repeated an infinite number of times.
What if we can adopt nature's way of sustainability and absolutely no waste in our industrial manufacturing cycles? What if every product that we make can be reused, recycled, or totally biodegraded to its organic components? Cradle to cradle is the solution to transform "the way we make things" to approximate the beautiful concept of sustainability in the natural world. How? Imagine incorporating sustainability into every product. Engineers, architects, and designers will have to design in end-of-life product handling while the product is still in the drawing boards. Is the item reusable? Are all the parts recyclable? Are the parts, paints, and coatings biodegradable?
In our current understanding, we tend to fall for “lesser of two evils” kind of choices. Plastic bags or paper bags for groceries? Coal or palm oil for power generation? Clearly, both choices in either of these two sets have disastrous effects on the environment, the variation being just a matter of degrees of severity. For the longest time, we’ve cornered ourselves into this false notion of limited alternatives.
Cradle-to-cradle recycling proposes to overhaul this perception of limited choices. When sustainability is introduced and added in the very design of the product, the options become numerous for us. The authors call cradle to cradle recycling as the “next industrial revolution” and this “thinking outside of the box” may just be the alternative we all need to address the world's waste problems.
Paper bag or plastic bag? Why not an “edible bag?”
Michael Arms writes for the Pacebutler Recycling and Environmental blog and maintains several recycling (http://www.squidoo.com/recycling-recycling/) and other environmental lenses in Squidoo. Pacebutler Corporation (http://www.pacebutler.com/) is one of several US trading companies which buy used cell phones directly from US cell phone users. You can also donate cell phones to your preferred charity or non-profit through Pacebutler at http://www.pacebutler.com/recycle_donate_cell_phones.cfm .
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