Cradle To Cradle Recycling: The Next Industrial Revolution

Tree huggers are adept at identifying the negative impact of every modern-day industry on the environment. Industrialists, on the other hand, find conservation advocates to be insensitive to the social and economic justifications for industrialization. They contend that if every environmental protection advice is observed thoroughly, it will lower living standards everywhere, technologically and economically. Both groups view industrial waste and the machineries that we create, as destructive to the environment. The choice is between unchecked industrialization and narrow environmentalism.

Is there another choice? As a matter of fact, there is a third alternative. Cradle to cradle recycling.

Recycling, as it is being done today, is actually "downcycling" or "cradle to grave" recycling. This idea is expounded brilliantly by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in their 2002 seminal book, “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things.” The innovations we improvise out of recycled objects are either lesser in quality (due to materials degradation or contamination) or use only very little of the old material (the remainder ending up as toxic waste in our landfills).

There is no such wastefulness in nature. How many cones does a pine tree need to produce for a new pine tree to flourish? A thousand, probably tens of thousands. All for one juvenile pine tree. Are those hundred other cones or seeds that didn't become new trees wasted? Certainly, not. They all fall to the ground and biodegrade to become fertilizers to assist in the pine tree's following spring cycle. Nature proudly displays sustainable cycles, such as that of the pine tree, all the time. Nothing in nature is wasted, every seed or cone ultimately helps to sustain the cycle that gets repeated a great number of times.

Cradle-to-cradle recycling is the adaptation of this very natural and seamless concept of sustainability into our manufacturing technologies right at the very start of the process - in the design or conceptualization of the finished product. Unusable excess is a result of mediocre conceptualization. Architects, designers, and engineers will have to provide for the end-of-life disposition of their products from the very beginning, how these items (with ALL of their components) can be reused or reintroduced into the production stream as “technical nutrients” or swiftly broken down and returned safely to the earth. None wasted, everything reusable or recyclable - that is the rationale of cradle-to-cradle recycling.

In our current understanding, we inevitably fall for “lesser of two evils” type of choices. Plastic bags or paper bags for groceries? Coal or palm oil for electricity generation? Obviously, both options in either of these two sets have disastrous impacts on nature, the variation being just a matter of degrees of severity. Since the dawn of the industrial age, we’ve confined ourselves into this environment of limited alternatives.

Cradle to cradle recycling, once it becomes instituted (and the opposition of entrenched interests is enormous) may very well become the "next industrial revolution." It shatters the appearance of limited options, because when sustainability is an integral component of the product design, we need not make those ridiculous choices. Every item reaching the end of its life-cycle is either reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable. That is cradle-to-cradle recycling.

By: Mike Arms

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 online 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.

Article Directory: http://www.articlewisdom.com

Please Rate this Article

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 

Not yet Rated