nature and ecology

Let's be clear: this book is about ideas.

It's not a "how to" manual. It's not a recipe book. It's about promoting the idea of designing things that "work" over their entire life cycle. Which includes the time they spend, for example, in landfill leaching toxins into the earth.

It's about how many commonly used household products carry all sorts of chemical legacies of their "short cut" design processes. When spending more time in the design process could result in big savings at the factory, at the furniture superstore, and in the amount of toxins off-gassed into your home or into the environment.

And it's about redesigning industrial processes inside large and small organisations to both save a LOT of money, and achieve the goal of "whole life cycle" safety and excellence.

And so, in explaining these concepts, there is little space for pages and pages of graphs and chemical formulas. It's a concept book - not an industrial chemistry manual.

It seems like there are three kinds of people who will read this book:
1) People who know nothing about the topic. Folk like this will be blown away by the possibility this book represents and will ask "WHY!?" the kinds of things outlined in the book aren't done as routine.
2) Industrial Chemists/Scientists. Folk like this will probably say "Yes! At last this stuff is getting publicised!" These people won't need the pages of formulas other reviewers have criticised the book for not having, they will know that stuff already.
3) Pseudo-Intellectuals. These people will likely criticise the book for not having the formulas and graphs they couldn't understand if it did.

If you want ideas, buy this book. If you want a chemistry textbook, buy one.

This is an extraordinary and unlikely book. It is not printed on paper, but on a waterproof polymer with the heft of good paper and more strength, a substance that reflects the right amount of light, yet holds the ink fast. It seems like an impossible fantasy, but so does much of what the authors propose about design and ecology. They speak with the calm certainty of the ecstatic visionary. Could buildings generate oxygen like trees? Could running shoes release nutrients into the earth? It seems like science fiction. Yet, here is this book, on this paper. The authors make a strong case for change, and just when you're about to say, "if only," they cite a corporation that is implementing their ideas. However, it's hard to believe their concepts would work on a large scale, in the face of powerful economic disincentives. We believe authors do aim some of their criticism at obsolete marketing and manufacturing philosophies, but the overall critique is well worth reading.

This book is a sometimes interesting, often meandering treatise on design. The authors, and American architect and a German chemist, have a very sincere desire to realign the world of design of objects and buildings so that they contribute to the betterment of the environment rather than destroy it. The title of the book "Cradle to Cradle" encapsulates their goal of designing objects that when they are no longer needed, naturally become useful inputs for the production of other objects rather than getting sent to the grave (or buried in a landfill). For example, they would like to see the creation of food packaging that could be thrown on the ground when the contents are consumed and would become fertilizer rather than non-biodegradable litter. (By this measure, the women concessionaires selling steamed rice treats in Indonesian trains are masters of design. The rice is both steamed and packaged in banana leafs, which are simply thrown out the train windows once the rice is consumed. But this practice also creates enormous problems- -since Indonesians have been accustomed to using such environmentally beneficial packaging for generations, they assume that "modern" packaging can be discarded in the same manner, much to the detriment of the Indonesian countryside. If you are living in a world of mixed packaging, some of which can be thrown out the window, and some of which must be discarded by other means, it's hard to keep straight which stuff goes where. That's a vital cultural issue that the authors don't explore here.)

McDounough and Braungart list the goals for their design program. They challenge inventors and industry leaders to design factories that "produce more energy than they consume, and purify their own waste water," and products that "can be tossed on the ground to decompose" or become "high-quality raw materials for new products" rather than simply "down-cycled". At the outset, these goals can sound a bit far-fetched. After, all, a factory that produces more energy than it consumes would seem to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But what the authors really mean here is not that the factory would miraculously produce something from nothing, but that the design of the factory would include such things as solar collectors on the roof and devices to capture heat that could then send energy back out to the power grid, perhaps even in excess of electrical energy coming in. They illustrate their lofty dreams with concrete designs that they have helped develop and implement, such as a cosmetics plant in Germany whose wastewater is actually cleaner than the water coming in to the plant, thanks to the new chemical formulations they recommended. What's more, they point out that such design efforts can be even be good for business, since in this particular example, the company was able to cut costs on hazardous materials handling and storage enough to more than offset slightly increased production costs with the new formulas. Such design efforts are fabulous examples of the potential benefits of thinking "out of the box".

The book contains quite a few additional examples of brilliant design ideas that can save resources as well as money. The book is also filled with surprising tidbits that haven't become general knowledge yet, like the potential hazards of wearing fabric made of recycled plastic bottles, and the fact that PET bottles were found to leach antimony when used as soap containers. The authors point out that the decision to use either recycled paper or virgin paper is not as clear cut as it seems- -while the production of virgin paper necessitates the cutting down of trees, recycling paper requires enormous amounts of bleaching, which produces PCBs. To demonstrate an alternative, the book itself is printed on a paper-free composite of plastics, which could be easily recycled into more book-grade plastics. The informative details and design goals of the book are quite interesting. However, the text often meanders around and through topics that are at best tangential or described better in other volumes. At times, some details or issues are also rehashed repetitively. In these places, it would have been better to focus on explicating McDonough and Braungart's own design program more fully. They've got some neat ideas that are well worth exploring, and it would have been great to be able to read even more about them and less about the general problems of environmental destruction that are described better in other books.