Unstoppable Ideas: Cradle To Cradle Recycling

Environmentalists are good at highlighting the disastrous 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 roles of 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 gadgets that we create, as harmful to the environment. The choice is between rampant industrialization and restrictive environmentalism.

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

Recycling, as we do it today, is in truth "downcycling" or "cradle to grave" recycling. This concept is explained forcefully by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in their 2002 visionary book, "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things." The stuff we make out of recycled objects are either inferior in quality (due to materials degradation or contamination) or use only a small fraction of the original material (the rest thrown away as poisonous waste in the landfills).

No such profligacy in nature. How many cones does a pine tree need to produce for a new pine tree to grow? A thousand, probably tens of thousands. All for a solitary juvenile pine tree. Are those thousand other cones or seeds that didn't become new trees wasted? Certainly, not. They all go back to the earth and decompose to become fertilizers to assist in the pine tree's subsequent reproduction cycle. Nature shows sustainable cycles, such as that of the pine tree, everywhere. Not a single thing in nature is wasted, every seed or cone ultimately contributes to fuel the cycle that gets replicated multiple number of times.

Cradle-to-cradle recycling is the incorporation of this very natural and wasteless way of sustainability into our industrial methods from the very beginning of the process - in the design or conceptualization of the finished product. Unusable excess is a result of inadequate conceptualization. Architects, designers, and engineers will have to provide for the end-of-life handling of their products from the very beginning, how these machineries (with ALL of their parts) can be recycled or reintroduced into the production stream as "technical nutrients" or quickly broken down and redeposited safely to the ground. None wasted, every part reusable or recyclable - that is the thesis of cradle-to-cradle recycling.

In our current industrial environment, we quite often fall for "lesser of two evils" type of choices. Plastic bags or paper bags for shopping? Coal or palm oil for electricity generation? Apparently, both choices in either of these two sets have disastrous effects on the environment, the variation being just a matter of degrees of severity. For the longest time, we've confined ourselves into this mirage of limited alternatives.

Cradle to cradle recycling, once it becomes part of our collective wisdom (and the opposition of vested interests is enormous) will probably be the "next industrial revolution." It dispels the appearance of limited choices, because when sustainability is an integral part 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.

Michael Arms contributes articles to the Pacebutler Recycling and Environmental blog and maintains several Squidoo lenses on recycling and the environment. Pacebutler Corporation is one of several US based 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.