W.L. Rathje

By W.L. Rathje

If you are reading this, you are concerned about waste. So am I, so when I read in the August 26, 2002, Time agazine about an innovative "eco-minded thinker" who is "a visionary, a prophet, even a zealot," who "dreams of a world without waste," I was hooked. I had to read architect and eco-designer extraordinaire William McDonough's new book (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, co-authored with Michael Braungart, North Point Press, 2002) to find out how his ground-breaking ideas were going to make our waste-handling jobs easier.

I know that being called a visionary and a prophet gives an author some room to be obscure or outlandish. Having read the book, I'm still at a loss as to what to make of it, so I thought I'd share my confusion about McDonough's cutting-edge waste ideas with you.

From the get-go, McDonough's viewpoint is different from most of the "eco-thinking" with which I am familiar. First, he dismisses recycling - according to the book, it should be called "downcycling" since recycled items are usually incorporated in lower-performance confabulations, such as white office paper becoming part of lower-grade newsprint or paperboard. Second, he equally dismisses source reduction - he says we should be celebrating nature's bounty and not bemoaning our misperception that it has limits. From a pro-environment stance, at first McDonough sounds negative, but he claims to be far from it.

In fact, what he has been doing is designing for major manufacturers production plants that celebrate nature's abundance, human creativity, and "fun," with lots of openness enhanced by skylights and sod on the same roofs to grow flowers, be a sanctuary for birds, and decrease torrential runoff.

But his exuberance doesn't stop at architecture. It overflows into myriad specific products that he believes exemplify "eco-effectiveness," and in the book, he and Braungart proclaim a grand manifesto that will not yield to source reduction or "using less stuff." Instead, the authors "see a world of abundance, no limits. In the midst of a great deal of talk about reducing the human ecological footprint, we offer a different vision. What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance of human creativity, culture, and productivity? That are so intelligent and safe, our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?". "Instead of trying to be less bad, let's be 100 percent good."

I don't want to sound even a muted dissonant chord in the face of such an optimistic symphony of human beneficence, but I do have some concerns.

First, such a flamboyant scheme requires that you know the territory, just as McDonough gets to know firsthand the people and the surroundings of the plants he designs. As far as "waste," which he wants to turn into "techno-nutrients" (whatever that means), he seems just a little off the mark in the areas with which I am familiar. He believes, as do many others before the Garbage Project's landfill digs, that "conventional disposable diapers [are] one of the largest single sources of solid waste in landfills." No, try one of many small sources of landfilled solid wastes - way, way, way behind C&D (something architect McDonough should know firsthand); way, way behind newspapers; way behind tires; and even behind many kinds of packaging and dozens of other products, including phonebooks.

"Imagine," the authors write, "what you would come upon today at a typical landfill." To be candid, I believe that their imagination is as close to a typical landfill as McDonough and Braungart have ever come. The first nine items they mention are relatively rare at best. Is this the kind of research upon which comprehensive product redesigns should be based?

Second, how about their concept of nonindustrial societies - ideas that echo the rather idealized view of the "noble savage" from 300 years ago? The authors write that a more prosperous design would allow products "to be used the way Native Americans used a buffalo carcass, optimizing every element, from tongue to tail." McDonough and Braungart are correct as far as they go, but as surprising as it might seem, waste is a common story among ancient hunters.

At the archaeological site of Olsen Chubbuck in Colorado, a band of Native American hunters stampeded a herd of Bison occidentalis (giant bison) into an arroyo some 8,500 years ago. One hundred eighty-five animals died. Of these, only 35 (19%) were completely butchered. Another 55% were picked over for a limb, a heart, or a tongue. The last 50 (another 27%) were left just as they fell.

Given this scenario, it is not surprising that, by some estimates, 70% of the large mammals in North America (including the giant bison) were hunted to extinction by ancient Native Americans. Is this the eco-effective model that Cradle to Cradle would emulate?

But the above comments are not really fair to McDonough. I'm an archaeologist, so I know more than most about the material realities of "waste" within past societies, and in particular I'm a "garbage" archaeologist, so I know modern refuse. So let's leave the areas of my expertise.

The authors state, "Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad." OK, then I have a couple of questions: Why has McDonough spent so much time designing eco-effective facilities to make automobiles, arguably one of the most un-eco-effective artifacts ever created by humans? As the authors congratulate McDonough for creating an eco-effective workplace for Ford Motor Company employees to make more and more cars, I hear the refrain of country/western singer-songwriter Jerry Reid:

Oh, Lord, Mr. Ford, how I wish that you could see
What your simple horseless carriage has become.
It seems your contribution to man, to say the least,
got a little outta hand. Oh, Lord, Mr. Ford, what have you done?

Then I noticed the cover of Cradle to Cradle. There, in front of my wondering eyes, appeared what many environmentalists consider their bane: an SUV (actually two) - a ponderous (most weigh more than 2 tons) gas-guzzling, pollution-emitting machine! What a surprise from authors who seem to consider most everything else around today as hazardous: "Even something as benign and necessary as clean drinking water can be lethal if you are submerged in it for more than a couple of minutes." Are they laughing at themselves here?

McDonough and Braungart do "imagine" cars that purify the air and produce drinking water. OK, but who is working on that? I don't know, so let's take a look at an example of a serious eco-effective product that the authors have actually designed: their book.

First, it is made of plastic (polypropylene with talc fillers to be more exact), but it exudes the same offgasses as paper books.

Second, according to McDonough, their "book of the future" can be "reclaimed by the publishing industry in a simple one-step process" and "books become books become books. . . ." That is, if you can cost-effectively collect the books separately, which is the major drawback that has kept this kind of eco-ideal recycling from happening before in the waste industry. You could upgrade all recycling totally if you figured out a way to collect only one specific type of product or item en mass. It's the mix that kills. How do you collect just Cradle to Cradle?

Third, their small tome is unusually heavy, at 1.24 lb. versus a similar length paperback book at 0.75 lb. - hence, the "book of the future" weighs 63.4% more than today's paperback. This all returns to the argument about what McDonough's "remaking the way we make things" is all about.

He writes that "although the book you hold in your hands is not yet that book [his ‘eco-effective version'], it is a step in that direction." But I cannot figure out why McDonough wants to replace traditional paper books. He says old-style books used heavy metal inks - OK, bad. He further asserts that eco-efficient recycled-paper books use soy-based inks that are dull and that the paper is so off-white, the books are hard to read. I guess I hadn't noticed, but it's still not optimal.

But if McDonough and Braungart's book becomes a bestseller, imagine the extra pollutants generated from transporting it across the country at almost two-thirds extra weight! If you ever pick up Cradle to Cradle for disposal, you will know exactly how heavyweight some of McDonough's eco-thinking can be.

Contributing Editor W.L. Rathje is founder and director of the Garbage Project.

MSW - May/June 2003