Amazing book.

Reusing is splendid.
Recycling is, recycling.
Reducing is even better.
But if we don't stop how things are made, things are still going to deteriorate the earth.

I am a huge fan of choosing what I buy based on how things are packaged - if it is sustainable.

This is another one of those books that will change your life (for the better) if you really take these recommendations to heart.
example: I don't even have a baby, and suddenly I want to use cloth diapers! HAHH!!

Highly recommended for anyone who cares about the planet

4.8/5

Great read! Encourages development of products that are not only less harmless, but actually _nutritious_ for our environment. The book is not even made of paper, but of synthetic materials that don’t use “wood pulp or cotton fiber and can be broken down and circulated infinitely in industrial cycles."

Please read this book. EVERYONE.
It invites a complete paradigm shift, coaxing, "Don't just reinvent the recipe, rethink the menu." An architect and chemist partnered to design a circular economy, where people rent services (like the use of a car) rather than buying products (the car would then be disassembled and remade rather than recycled). Their premise is that waste equals food: byproducts of material extraction can be used rather discarded. For example, air conditioning compressors waste the hot air they generate, which could instead be stored in fuel cells for later use as energy.
They cite a cherry tree as an example of a circular system: its "product" is fruit, but its blossoms provide beauty and later compost. "The marvelous thing about effective systems is that one wants more of them, not less." And we can shift immediately to using renewable energy. Germany, for example, has moved from using 30 litres of fuel per square meter annually to only 1.5. Movement away from "intergenerational remote tyranny" (as they call the present reliance on landfills and single use products) is imperative NOW, and this book shows us how to build beauty as well as environmental integrity into our lives. To affirm the possibility of such real and important change now, the book itself is not even written on paper!

Interesting and useful product/architectural design philosophy. I will keep it in mind for future ideas.

Three stars doesn't quite do justice to this book. Its ideas merit five stars, but the text sags a bit and tends to repeat itself a lot, thereby losing some power.

What the text lacks in eloquence, however, it makes up for in tactility. I couldn't stop petting this book. Its "synthetic paper" pages felt so resilient and smooth and sleek. The authors chose to make a recyclable, "treeless" book from from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. It is waterproof and with a certain treatment its pages can be wiped clean and reprinted with a new text. It has the capacity to be recycled as a book many times over or it could be reincarnated as another plastic item...

....To my experience only vellum and leather beats the overall sensory experience this text offers.

I first learned of McDonough--an architect with an amazing, cavernous mind--when I read a sermon he delievered at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City entitled "Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things." The piece is brilliant and beautiful and I wish everyone would read it. It contains many of the ideas presented in Cradle to Cradle in a much more compelling, succinct way.

Here is a link to an awkardly formated, but well-proofed pdf of the piece:
Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things by William McDonough
This is an HTML version that might be easier to look at in some ways but is sloppy with lots of typos:
Design, Ecology, Ethics and the Making of Things by William McDonough

In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough (an American architect) and Braungart (a German chemist) uncover the way that bio-destructive practices permeate every aspect of our lives. They describe how toxic materials are hidden in almost everything around us: our fabrics and textiles, our machines, our food containers, our food!, our toiletries, our technology, our furniture, our buildings, etc, etc. It's truly staggering.

Their section on water was also particularly memorable. I learned that households are responsible for much more water pollution than I had previously thought. (I formerly saw water pollution as primarily an industrial transgression.) But no, we flush loads of chemicals down the drain in the form of household cleaners/soaps, other home maintenance materials, art supplies, etc. Additionally, we flush chemo, hormones, and other medicated effluents into our waterways from our homes and hospitals. And now, with our culture's obsession with "antibacterial" cleansers, we're suffusing our waste water with bacteria-killing elements that prevent the breakdown of our sewage and slop.

***After reading this section, I went out and bought all non-toxic, biodegreadable (this is key!) soaps and household cleaners: I'm particularly in love with Mrs. Meyers and Method products. For antibacterial action, I've heard it's best to stick with good old fashioned alchohol (applied with friction), which does the job and then becomes inactive in 15 minutes.****

Though McDonough and Braungart expertly outline the disastrous, bio-destructive systems we have created, their book is only about these problems insofar as it seeks to understand them--because it believes we can fix them all through good design. Good design (in an environmental sense) has been nearly dead for over one hundred years and McDonough and Braungart are trying to revive it.

Because the industrial revolution furnished us with the fossil fuel power to override natural systems and natural energy flows, design has paid little attention to natural systems and natural energy flows for the past century. For example, architects no longer situate buildings, their windows, and surrounding trees with regard to the patterns of the sun, instead they disregard this free and powerful energy source and design our buildings with artificial systems--electric lights, AC, central heat, etc.--to regulate light and temperature indoors. And this is how we design most things and most products...

But, we pay through the nose to live this way--to live within poor, unintelligently designed infrastructure that is ignorant of the natural systems and energy flows in which it exists (like a foreign body or alien cancer)--sacrificing huge financial resources, large swaths of land, our health and the health of other living things....even (I believe) sacrificing the peace of nations.

In a grand metaphorical sense, this book wants to take us back to the old New England saltbox house. One that was intelligently built of natural, local materials, with south facing windows and nearby stand of deciduous trees that allow copious sunlight in during the winter months (when the sun is low and the trees are bare) and then alternatively blocks the sunlight during the hot summer months (when the sun is high and reflects off the deep eaves of the roof and is absorbed by the fully maned trees). And I for one want to go there.

A lot of environmental books/movies leave me feeling hopeless and terrified (a la McKibben's Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, the movie The Future of Food, etc.) - but this book provided a high-level overview of how to implement the necessary infrastructural changes to allow society to proceed in a sustainable, non-destructive way.

It deals with the topics of how goods are manufactured both from the perspective of how we expect them to be made (a cradle-to-grave mentality, if they even last that long) and how the manufacturers cater to a population satisfied with disposable goods. It addresses energy infrastructure, and the sometimes dubious methods involved in producing energy for a developed/developing world.

It uses relate-able examples that simplify the task of visualizing such a world.

And the most important thing, for me, was simply that it is so hopeful, without being naively optimistic. It provides for a groundwork for implementing these ideas in a manner that's economically feasible, a requirement in today's increasingly capitalist present-centric (with an increasingly blind eye towards the future) world.

I urge anyone who has any sort of curiosity in these matters to read the book. It's not long, nor a tough read (unlike
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays which had me pausing after every few paragraphs to digest it!) One could even approach it as a whimsical sci-fi book, a portrayal of a not-TOO-different world in which we're not slowly burying ourselves in a rapidly heating world towards a government-sponsored oblivion. Whimsy indeed - we need not all live in yurts to survive the next century.

The gist is "don't just create better, create good." Which ... is nice, albeit idealistic. The design industry (the people who'd design those cars that run on water, man) already knows this. Anyone reading this is already an environmentalist. What can the average person do with this information?

Pie-in-the sky book on sustainability- good read and presents important concepts, but the authors are completely uncritical of their case studies and present a flimsy roadmap of how to make their vision a reality.

To concept of cradle-to-cradle certainly is appealing, but the author's own attempt to implement this concept through the very unique construction of the book is unconvincing. Sure, this book can be probably be truly recycled or even "up-cycled", but if I were to throw this book away, how can I be sure my waste management company would dispose of it properly? There are no instructions on this book on how to dispose of it properly. The right systems are not in place.

Of course, the authors intent in writing/creating this book is to help us get to that world- but I'd like to see some more practical writing on this. Write a follow-up book and give us a roadmap. Acknowledge the failures and shortcomings of their own examples, for Pete's sake. They devote pages lauding Ford's efforts in making their Dearborn factory more sustainable while ignoring the fact that the company should have focused their efforts on re-designing their cars.

To get a better comprehensive approach towards sustainability, one should read this book in conjunction with Getting Green Done and Green To Gold (among others).

This is a fascinating book that discusses ways in which we can think about upcycling (not recycling, but upcycling) and having our goods and manufacturing reflect a "feedforward" process wherein we consider the future of the materials we use in manufacturing. It's similar to a typical environmentally-focused text, with the usual critiques and recommendations, but it's coming at the issue from a positive mindset, less so a punitive one.

The opening gambit presented is cool - the book itself is made of materials that are durable, waterproof, and could be recycled in most locations. The materials of the book are to be thought of not as material inputs to a product, but as nutrients that can be revitalized in a future manufacturing stage or ecological process.

The book is a bit dated (20 years old - a lot has changed, and much of the idealism which the writers carry have clearly waned), and sometimes the writing comes off as a bit unfocused, but it's otherwise a nice piece of writing that has influenced many readers, citizens, and fellow thinkers across the world.

A bit more informal introduction/ narrative about early 2000s corporate environmentalism. Chemical cleanups and the like aren’t sexy save the earth techniques, but I’m glad they were on top of this nearly 25 years ago.

If you're interested in waste management or ecological sustainability, this book is the best one I have read so far. I am diving deep into this space right now, and this short book has already fuelled my thinking in ways that are exciting and revolutionary.

The authors champion a no-nonsense, holistic attitude towards creating a world that thrives not only ecologically, but economically and socially.

Amazing, amazing.

Depressing as hell, though simultaneously inspiring. Either way, it sure gets you thinking.

It would be a wonderful world indeed if everything we made was designed and manufactured to be reused and repurposed, as the authors recommend. Unfortunately, the capitalist paradigm under which we live actively discourages "eco-effective" design practices.