We advocate and do the three R's - "reduce, reuse, recycle" to lessen the destructive effect of our wasteful way of life and often unnecessary products on nature, and then we step back, satisfied 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 waste that's going to be dumped into our landfills (or worse, in the oceans), we've done a fantastic job 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 seminal book, the authors assert that recycling, as it is practiced today, is in truth "downcycling" or "cradle to grave" recycling. We make plant beds out of styrofoam or produce news print out of white paper. The new products we fashion out of recycled materials are invariably inferior to the original (because of materials degradation or contamination) or utilize very little of it (the remainder ending up in the landfills as dangerous waste).
Compare this with how nature takes care of her excess. When a tree brings forth a thousand flowers to reproduce or replicate itself, it is highly likely that only one of those seeds will actually become a new tree. But, we don't find the 999 other flowers wasted since all these fall down to the ground to become fertilizer to help begin the tree's next reproduction cycle. In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Waste is synonymous to food, everything goes back to the earth as fertilizer. This is known as sustainability, every leaf or seed or flower contributes to "sustain" the cycle and the process is replicated infinitely without any unusable excess.
Cradle-to-cradle recycling is the adaptation of this very natural and wasteless approach to sustainability into our manufacturing cycles from the very beginning of the process - in the design or conceptualization of the finished product. Waste is a attribute of mediocre conceptualization. Architects, designers, and engineers will have to include the eventual disposition of their products from the very start, how these devices (with ALL of their parts) can be reused or reintroduced into the production stream as "technical nutrients" or quickly biodegraded and redeposited safely to the ground. None wasted, every part reusable or recyclable - that is the underlying idea of cradle-to-cradle recycling.
A woman who goes to the market chooses between plastic bags or paper bags for her groceries. A municipal council in Germany debates if their town should keep using coal or switch to palm oil for energy production. In our everyday routines, we often get trapped into "lesser of two evils" type of choices. Plastic will remain for thousands of years and coal is the dirtiest of all the fuels we use. On the other hand, paper production kills trees, and palm oil production threatens extinction to orangutans. Lesser evils. Since the start of the industrial period, we've been boxed into this illusion of destructive options.
Cradle to cradle recycling, once it becomes widely accepted (and the opposition of vested interests is enormous) may very well become the " next industrial revolution." It dispels the appearance of limited choices, because when sustainability is an integral component of the product design, we need not make those constricting choices. Every product reaching the end of its life-cycle is either reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable. That is cradle-to-cradle recycling.
Michael Arms writes for the Pacebutler Recycling and Environmental blog and maintains several Squidoo lenses on recycling and the environment. Pacebutler Corporation 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.
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