McDonough & Braungart: Cradle to Cradle

Biography

William McDonough was born in Tokyo in 1951, the son of an American executive. He trained in architecture in the US and quickly found a niche designing environmentally friendly buildings. He was Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia between 1994 and 1999. As well as his company with Michael Braungart, he runs an architecture firm, a consultancy and a clean tech venture capital firm.

Michael Braungart was born in Germany in 1958. A chemist by training, his career has taken in the private sector, academia and a substantial amount of work as a Greenpeace activist. He runs his own business and is a Professor at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

Together McDonough and Braungart developed the Cradle to Cradle concept, set up the company McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC) as an implementation/certification company and wrote the book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things”.

Contribution

McDonough and Braungart’s big idea was the Cradle to Cradle concept outlined in their eponymous 2002 book. They shunned the eco-efficiency (less stuff) approach taken by the mainstream of environmental thinking and adopted an ecological model (better stuff) where the economy simply becomes one of the earth’s natural cycles. It should be noted that the origin of the term “cradle to cradle” is much debated with some attributing it to the German architect Walter Stahel.

Cradle to Cradle has three key principles:

• Use Solar Income: as opposed to fossil fuels which are stored solar energy;

• Waste = Food: nothing goes to waste, all material flows should be useful to the rest of the economy or the environment, or designed out;

• Respect Diversity: be compatible with the natural world.

Toxic materials should not be tolerated in designs, summed up in the classic soundbite:

“Take the filters out of the pipes and put them where they belong - in the designers’ heads.”

This is a key difference between Cradle to Cradle and standard eco-efficiency approaches. Eco-efficiency doesn’t encourage us to substitute materials, merely minimise them. Using less toxic material is a bit like saying “I’m not murdering as many people as I used to”, whereas the ecological model says “Thou shalt not kill”.

Another key concept of Cradle to Cradle is the ‘technical nutrient’. In the same way as biological nutrients can be cycled endlessly in the environment, technical nutrients are non-toxic man made materials which can be recycled endlessly into the same grade of material, unlike many materials which are ‘downcycled’ into lower grade material. “Cradle to Cradle” as a physical book follows these principles, being made out of compatible plastics so the whole thing could be melted down and recycled en masse ie it is a technical nutrient. It also has the interesting spin off benefit that you can read it in the bath.
The most famous implementation of Cradle to Cradle is the Climatex fabric. The fabric is created from wool and ramie fibre and is completely compostable. It also claims to soak up and dissipate moisture for “climate control seating comfort.” Only 16 out of 1600 possible dyes passed stringent toxicology tests, but these could produce any colour except black (Henry Ford would spin in his grave). Famously the manufacturing process produces effluent cleaner than the Swiss drinking quality water entering the plant.

William McDonough in particular has become something of an eco-celebrity, being feted by A-listers such as Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt and Darryl Hannah and winning may awards. However his past collaborators have not been so enamoured, lining up to attack him in a 2008 article in Fast Company magazine. Their criticisms include McDonough being self-mythologising, leaving a trail of failed projects in his wake, being difficult to work with, and being rather grasping in terms of both money and intellectual property rights.

The personal criticisms are irrelevant to McDonough and Braungart’s status as Green Gurus. What they have done with Cradle to Cradle is articulate a higher level of environmental design. We do not expect our visionary thinkers to also be fantastic implementers. Perhaps the duo should recognise their limitations and loosen the intellectual property protection on Cradle to Cradle and let good implementers take the concept to reality, or test it to destruction.

A practical criticism of of Cradle to Cradle has come from Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek of the Wuppertal Institute, who does not believe it can be implemented on a grand scale. This is a genuine concern – being an ecological model, the concept is limited by the same factor as the cycles in the natural world – the ability to capture solar energy. Therefore there is a strong argument for Cradle to Cradle to co-exist with efficiency measures, particularly in the use of energy.



© Terra Infirma 2009, all rights reserved

James Lovelock: Gaia

Biography

James Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire, England in 1919. He initially studied Chemistry and then took a PhD in medicine. He claims to have invented, but not patented, the microwave oven and then invented the Electron Capture Detector (ECD) which was able to detect the presence of pollutants in the atmosphere to a very precise level. Lovelock is most famous for his Gaia hypothesis (later the Gaia Theory) that living organisms regulate the conditions in the biosphere to keep it within hospitable limits. He lives and works in a barn in Cornwall. In his later years he has not lost his ability to stir up controversy.

Contribution

While the invention of the ECD was certainly a huge breakthrough in our ability to analyse our interactions with the environment, Lovelock’s inclusion here as a guru is down to his revolutionary Gaia hypothesis.

The birth of the Gaia hypothesis can be traced back to the 1960s when Lovelock was employed by NASA to develop systems to detect life on Mars. He realised that simply trying to capture a living cell would be too hit and miss, and that looking for evidence of life would be a better bet. Living organisms, he reasoned, required fluids such as water and the atmosphere to bring them food and remove waste products. These fluids would undoubtedly be changed by this interaction, so there was a strong possibility that life could be detected simply by the constituency of the atmosphere (Mars having no water).

When Lovelock studied the atmosphere of the Earth to assess what evidence he could use to detect a planet supporting life, he found that it had many unstable components living in apparent equilibrium. 21% of the air is oxygen, a very reactive gas, which should react with the trace amounts of methane present and with the earth’s minerals. Until this point it had largely been assumed that the Earth’s atmosphere had come about by chance and that living organisms had evolved to thrive in it, but Lovelock threw this assumption on its head. His new hypothesis was that those organisms en masse were responsible for maintaining conditions in the biosphere in a reasonably stable and comfortable condition much in the same way as organisms regulate their internal salinity and temperature - homeostasis. As such the whole Earth could be considered as one living organism.

This may have simply stayed as an obscure scientific hypothesis had Lovelock’s neighbour William Golding (of “Lord of the Flies” fame) not suggested the name “Gaia”, the Greek Goddess of the Earth. This new name and the classic 1979 book “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth” flung the idea into the mainstream, and led to the embracing of the idea by the New Age wing of the environmental movement. This perceived ‘spirituality’ element of the hypothesis led to attacks from the scientific establishment. Lovelock is no hippy and reacted by changing the hypothesis to more of an analogy – like a living organism – and clarifying that it had no aspect of ‘planning’ which would imply a higher intelligence at work. Instead, organisms had evolved and would continue to evolve to maintain hospitable conditions as it was in their best interest. Many biologists still dispute the Gaia hypothesis, but it has been generally embraced by climatologists, including the International Panel on Climate Change, leading it to become known as the Gaia theory.

In the 1979 book, Lovelock despairs at the then obsession of the environmental movement with industrial pollution in general and the effect of CFCs on the ozone layer in particular. He called on them instead to campaign against the destruction of natural habitats for agriculture. While he was right about the latter, he has since had to admit he was wrong about CFCs once the link to ozone depletion was established in 1984. Interestingly it was Lovelock’s own study of CFCs that opened the doors to this discovery.

On man-made climate change, he asserts that Gaia will reset the balance upset by greenhouse gas emissions but over a long timeframe in human terms: in 1979 he quoted ‘perhaps’ 1000 years but in 2006 pronounced that 100,000 years may be the time period required.

In 2004, he caused something of a stir by declaring that nuclear energy would have to be adopted quickly to tackle climate change. This was portrayed in the media as a break from the environmental mainstream, but his endorsement of nuclear and other technologies is clear back in the 1979 book, where he stated that uranium was simply a natural remnant of the forces that created the Earth and should be seen as a natural resource like any other.

Of all the gurus in this series, Lovelock is probably the most revolutionary: always controversial, undoubtedly brilliant and never dull.




© Terra Infirma 2009, all rights reserved