By Matt Prindiville, Associate Director
“The goal of the upcycle is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world with clean air, water, soil, and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.” - excerpt from the Upcycle by Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart
I recently read Bill
McDonough's and Michael Braungart’s new book, the Upcycle. As someone who was profoundly affected by
their first book, Cradle-to-Cradle, I looked forward to my long cross-country
plane ride home where I eagerly devoured the book. From the first pages, I was struck by what
these two do best: inspire us to believe that environmental problems can be
solved by new ways of thinking and doing.
Abundance versus Scarcity
The central message of the
Upcycle is that our natural world is a thriving place full of abundance, and
that we can design production and consumption systems that support nature’s
tendency toward abundance rather than diminish it. For folks familiar with the conventional definition
of “upcycle,” which means converting waste materials into new
materials or products of better quality or better environmental value, this is
an expansion of that idea. McDonough
and Braungart’s focus is on green design as the core strategy to achieve this
goal, and they cite numerous real-world and theoretical examples to confirm
this position.
Where many environmental
“solutions” are based on the premise of using less resources by becoming more
“eco-efficient,” they argue that this focus is often misguided. From their perspective, what is most
important is becoming “eco-effective,” which I paraphrase to mean: getting what
we want through either no negative impact or beneficial support to the natural
world. They use the example of people
enjoying long, hot showers. The
conventional green wisdom is that long, hot showers are bad for the environment. If you care, you should purchase a low-flow
showerhead, set the temperature as cold as you can stand it, and get out as
soon as possible. They argue that if you
have a closed-loop water circulation system that is heated by passive-solar
technology, you can take a hot shower as long as you want with virtually no
impact on the planet. That’s an
eco-effective solution.
“Less Bad is No Good”
This is my new favorite
slogan. Many of our environmentally
regulations are focused on making things “less bad.” For example, we set limits on the amount of
harmful emissions that a power plant or industrial facility can pollute. While these laws are important, McDonough and
Braungart write that we should put greater focus on developing incentives for
the creation and deployment of new technologies that can deliver the same goods
and services without pollution or ecological harm. “Not bad” is good for everyone.
A “Regulation” Means “Here is Something to Be Redesigned”
McDonough and Braungart
use several examples to show where regulations are “alerts to design
failures.” We need laws protecting our
air, water and land because of poor design around production and consumption
and the subsequent waste and pollution created.
These regulations can be made moot through the widespread deployment of
technologies and practices that deliver the same goods without pollution or
waste. While some would deride this as
naïve or “happytalk,” it is a powerful reminder of what we can achieve with
sufficient motivation and the right drivers in place.
Speaking of the Right Drivers…
If I have one criticism of
the Upcyle, it’s that McDonough and Braungart are overly focused on green
design and not enough on public policy change.
I understand that they are respectively, an architect and a chemist, and
they have made significant global contributions through developing green design
solutions for large companies. Their
Cradle-to-Cradle Certification process for product design is creating a new
de-facto industry standard for safe and sustainable products. Talking
about design is where they are most comfortable.
But green design without
an appropriate legal framework often doesn’t effectively reward environmental
leaders and can let the laggards off the hook.
Often,
if one company wants to do the right thing, they are put at a competitive
disadvantage. And some green innovations, like designing safer chemicals for use
in electronics, will not be widely deployed without legislation. This
is especially true for systems innovations, like extended producer
responsibility. One company may want its
product or packaging reused or recycled at the end of its useful life, but they
cannot change or improve our existing recycling systems in and of themselves.
Most big environmental problems cannot
be solved by one company working alone on voluntary measures, or even loosely
allied through trade associations. Really
big problems call for a shift in the way we do things for everyone involved,
and it’s often these types of problems that require legislation to hold
businesses and individuals to the same higher standards.
Upcycling the Upcycle
The marriage of green
design and effective public policy will be the key to upcycling the
Upcycle. We need to create the legal
frameworks that empower and reward individuals and companies for developing goods
and services in ways that protect and even nourish the planet. These frameworks must also set standards to pull
the laggards up to join the environmental leaders. Extended producer
responsibility, safer chemicals policy, a price on carbon are all examples of
the policies needed to achieve this vision.
If
we are successful in passing the right policy drivers, then we will be able to
widely encourage and deploy the design solutions that McDonough, Braungart and
many others are working to create for our most pressing environmental problems. We will also have gone a long way toward
creating the “delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world with clean
air, water, soil, and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and
elegantly enjoyed.”
