I read this one when it came out, so many years ago, and I now realized how much it influenced some of the hippie-ish choices I make in my own life, particularly my predilection for natural cleaning supplies and preowned items. But it was immensely depressing to read about these hopes and visions for remaking our world into a place where everything is designed to be beneficial, as opposed to cheap and harmful, from more than 15 years ago, and to see how little of it has been implemented, and how desperately we should have embraced this philosophy way back when. I'm kind of ashamed. We should design all things to be upcycled and to make our world a healthier place. It just makes sense. Instead I sit amongst plastic, depressed. (It really hits you hard after having children, with the universe of plastic waste thrown at them in hopes of delighting and amusing them, even as it simultaneously creates a problem that will totally affect those very children, and their world, for the rest of their lives and beyond. Sigh.)

3.5

"Cradle to Cradle" is a marvelous, thought-provoking book, which should be a bible for any corporate CEO or anyone engaged in developing products and services. I will go further and assert that schools must teach the lessons in the book to students in schools and colleges.
The book's foundation rests on the dramatic change in our thinking since the Industrial Revolution. While humans have always tried to exert some control over nature (agriculture, buildings, warfare, etc.), the desire to have a degree of control has morphed into a passion for mastery over nature. This change in our philosophy has damaged the environment almost beyond repair.
Apart from this, we do not make products to last long or examine the nature of the ingredients at the end of life. The authors call our mentality, 'cradle-to-grave.' Because of the prevalence of the 'cradle-to-grave' mentality, we are constantly polluting the environment and losing many vital products that we can reuse for other products or in the production cycle.
This process generates enormous waste, which we seek to incinerate or destroy.
The authors propose a radical change in our thinking, business practices, and lifestyles. They state it is not good enough to do less harm: we need a radical overhaul of our lifestyle and philosophy. The authors then propose a five-step process for businesses, which will help companies to adopt a 'cradle-to-cradle' philosophy.
Where do the authors fall short in their noble aim of motivating us to change? While they illustrate their approach with a few case examples, notably Ford Motor Company, they focus on cases where they are involved.
They do not discuss the task and effort required for a company to change its philosophy from 'cradle-to-grave' to 'cradle-to-cradle.' What are the costs and benefits a company hopes to accrue?
How will this philosophical change influence consumer behavior? I will illustrate this with two examples: cameras and mobile phones. I started photography using a film camera, which works even now. However, camera companies launch new models annually and hope consumers will upgrade their equipment much sooner than the useful life of a camera ends. Mobile phone manufacturers follow the same approach, teasing new features and enticing consumers to upgrade their phones. Most consumer durable manufacturers adopt the same strategy and build early obsolescence into their products.
The authors are silent on a crucial aspect of product development and advertising: tearing a product apart when it dies and recycling all or most of the components they would typically trash is insufficient. We need to slow down the endless cycle of new product launches and ensure they build products that last longer than they do today. However, this change conflicts with the pressure to increase profits and give investors better quarterly returns.
The book, however, is excellent and will give you much food for thought. I believe the authors should address young audiences because the young will live with the mess we are creating. The book goes far but not far enough: the young, who can revolutionize society and business, will not read the book, which is a tragedy for the planet.

Okay, I have mixed feelings.

Yeah, on the one side, this book is full of great ideas and food for thought (the last chapter really got me thinking and inspired me to adopt some ideas in my corporate life).

From the other side, in the world where large corporations are responsible for drastic climate change, the ideas from the book sound like naive dreams.

But overall, I’d give the book 4.5.

A great topic, but not the best presentation. Other books may cover this topic better (such as Slow Death By Rubber Duck maybe).

A lot of important information in here. Even recycled materials can create hazardous dust (phthalates) with normal use. The authors have a very clear concept of how to create products that can be broken down into restructurable components, but the key is in being able to easily separate manufactured and natural ingredients. There are some great examples of how green building design (while keeping local environment in mind) can cost only 10% more to build than non-green buildings, and save a lot of $ in electricity bills in the long run, while creating a much more pleasant environment for workers.

While there was a lot of talk about what these products should look like, though, there was no real discussion of how to make them, only encouragement that people should pursue their design. One of the authors is a chemist and I would have at least liked to see some basic discussion of possible chemical/manufacture ideas that could be expanded on.

I listened to the audio book, and Stephen Hoye was not a good reader for this. He is great at narrating simple, motivational things, but the subject matter did not match his reading style, and it became patterned and a bit monotone.

This book made me change my major

”How can we support and perpetuate the rights of all living things to share in a world of abundance? How can we love the children of all species- not just our own-for all time? Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now. What would it mean to become, once again, native to this place, the Earth--the home of all our relations? This is going to take us all, and it is going to take forever. But then, that's the point.”

This books feels a bit like a bible. A jumping off point into learning everything else. I have so many notes that I need to go back over, and so many concepts that I now want to look up for further understanding. Man, I loved this one.

I learned so much from this book. Production and consumerism wasn't really a part of environmentalism that I was overly interested in before this book. I thought it was important. But I also more or less thought it was a lost cause. That we would need huge technological advances before we could make any changes. Apparently, I've just been reading the wrong books.
I would say though that it needs a different introduction. It works just fine for the first two chapters of the book where we discuss mostly doom and gloom: all the problems with our current industrial system, but it did not prepare me for the ideas presented after chapter 2. After all the negative of the first two chapters, the optimistic world proposed seemed utopian and entirely unattainable. I had to suspend my belief for a while before I could jump on board with all these radical ideas.
I also thought that the book did get a little repetitive at times, but when it was making new points I always found them to be very insightful. I also found the notes section at the back of the book to be a little lacking. Some topics that were brought up didn't have any paper referenced in the back which is a shame, because I wanted to know where their information was coming from for a few of the issues addressed where they didn't have a paper cited. I understand that a lot of their examples and theories come from their own experience in the field, but I would have appreciated if they pointed me in the right direction to learn more about some topics.
There are so many examples of the products of the future that rely on eco-effectiveness, and there are a bunch that they have already helped to create: from fabrics to soaps to factory buildings. And imagining a world where all the products are helpful to all facets of the world is remarkable.
I am far more interested in learning more about the manufacturing process now than I used to be. This book has definitely opened the door for me, which is why I found it to be so valuable. I also think this would be a fantastic book for anyone who doesn't know anything about manufacturing or environmental ideals to read, the authors take the time to define main principles and terms, which I found to be useful on a number of occasions.

A push for a big shift in the way that we view design/materials. This book made me think and feel some big things about the world. Good stuff.

I'm not sure what to think of this book. It's kind of like the antithesis of "An Inconvenient Truth." Where Al Gore said humans are destroying the planet, but you can make it all OK by replacing a lightbulb, "Cradle to Cradle" suggests that everything you currently do for the environment is not good enough. The authors attack all recycling as "downcycling" and criticize most energy-conscious building models. But they don't offer clear alternatives or helpful advice for finding products that follow their "cradle to cradle" philosophy. There are some interesting ideas and an impassioned manifesto, but I wish there was more practical advice.

Amazing book. Here are some key points that I found interesting:

- Before the Industrial Revolution, there was no such thing as waste.
- Universal design solutions are not as good as diverse, place-specific ones.
- Everyday products are often toxic.
- Instead of trying to be "less bad," environmentalists should try to be only good.
- Growth doesn't have to have negative consequences.
- The majority of products are designed with only one life cycle in mind; they should be designed for all of their life cycles.
- Recycling often results in inferior or weaker material, particularly when more than one material is in what's being recycled.
- Waste should be food, either for industrial or biological cycles.
- Economy, ecology and equity should all be considerations.
- The product you end up with after this may not be the same as the one you were initially working with.

The authors are not hippies or crazies; they have worked with the mayor of Chicago and Ford, among many others.

This book really made me reflect on my own experience in trying to do better amidst our climate emergency. A lot of it involves reduction: reduce waste, buy less, use less. As a non-religious person, I feel called out when the authors pointed out that it is actually a form of repentance, atonement, and sacrifice—a quasi-religious doctrine of the people in early societies.

They wrote: "Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves, ... to consume and produce less by minimizing, avoiding, reducing, and sacrificing. ... The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero ecological footprint", and "Wouldn't it be wonderful if, rather than bemoaning human industry, we had reason to champion it?".

So then the question becomes: How can we support the rights of all living things in a world of abundance? The authors believe that the answer lies in eco-effectiveness: working on the right products, services, and systems, instead of making the wrong things less bad. The key is not to "make human industries and systems smaller, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores and nourishes the rest of the world".

The very concept of waste should not exist, as it is in nature. Products should be designed with their end of life in mind, where all materials should be able to be separated, extracted without compromises in quality, and made into new products. Most products were not designed with recycling in mind, making it hard to separate out the materials (e.g. "monstrous hybrids": the combination of organic and technical materials, like leathers that are chemically tanned, which are impossible to separate). Recycling generally downgrades materials because they contain impurities. Recycled paper has shorter fibers, and is less smooth, allowing more toxic ink particles to abrade into the air. Garments made of recycled plastic bottles are rife with toxins that were never supposed to touch human skin. Without a complete makeover of our processes, "blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better—and perhaps worse than doing nothing."

The authors also proposed the concept of a "product of service". Instead of consumers buying, owning, and disposing of products containing valuable materials, they would only buy the services, e.g. ten thousand hours of TV viewing. When they finish with the product, the manufacturer replaces it, taking the old model back, breaking it down, and using its materials to make new products; manufacturers retain ownership of the materials.

Another key feature of nature is diversity. In natural ecosystems, "diversity means strength, and monoculture means weakness". Nowadays, controlling nature is not only the reigning trend, it has even become an aesthetic preference. The perfectly manicured grass lawns are seen as "civilized" compared to wildly growing bushes. We view ourselves as entities separate from the surrounding or landscape, trying to control nature to achieve our goals. Instead, we should start to integrate nature into the goal, and engage with "local material and energy flows, with local social, cultural, and economic forces". The authors invite us to "use our ingenuity to stay here; to become, once again, native to this planet."

*****

My problem with this book begins when the authors proposed a framework of "The Triple Top Line". This framework urges us to prioritise a blend of contradicting concepts: Economy (Adam Smith's neoliberalism), Equity (Marx's & Engel's communism), and Ecology (Rachel Carson's ecologism). While they are not wrong in saying "eco-effectiveness sees commerce as the engine of change, and honors its need to function quickly and productively", the said efficiency of commerce is only made possible by—to use Marxist concepts—the select number of bourgeoisies holding ownership and control of the proletariat's labour power (the very concept of private property that they severely misinterpreted in the book as ownership of things by individuals), making the proletariats critically vulnerable to exploitation. It is telling that an example in the book involved an employee having to sacrifice higher wages to go back to the factory that one of the authors designed eco-effectively, stating the better working environment as the reason, and saw that as a testament to success.

The authors mentioned that the neoliberal Smith wrote from a moralist standpoint, and the invisible hand he imagined would have been working in a market full of "moral" people making individual choices, which they themselves admitted that it is an "ideal of the eighteenth century, not necessarily a reality of the twenty-first". So can we realistically expect capitalists to move towards eco-effectiveness without government intervention or economic incentives? It seems convenient that the examples they picked were all profitable, but I cannot imagine that would be the case for the majority of situations. It feels naive to include the infamous invisible hand as part of the framework.

Moreover, the way the authors brush aside the problem of overconsumption is alarming to me, no matter how good the product we consume is. Prior to capitalism, people took enough for their self-sustenance, but in capitalism, nature is unendingly extracted to manufacture more and more products, fed to consumers enticed by various marketing tactics. They make us feel insecure about ourselves, entice us with illusory discounts, probe into our private lives, and keep us in a state of depressive hedonia—what Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism described as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. Maybe too much of a good thing is a bad thing after all?

And even if with eco-effectiveness we end (or at least lessen) our alienation from nature, we are still alienated from each other. Living in a capitalist society means constant competition: with other workers for jobs, with other consumers for desired products, and with other businesses for more profit. Workers are alienated from themselves, as the job necessary for their survival consumes most hours of their lives, such that they barely know themselves outside of their job.

This book had profound ideas but, ultimately, eco-effectiveness cannot negate the problems of capitalism. Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics touched on similar ideas, but it encapsulates a wider range of concepts that paint a more holistic picture. Raworth had a few more players in her framework that were completely missing in this book, namely the commons and the state. She sees humans as more than self-interested, calculating beings; humans are also social and interdependent. I would definitely recommend giving her book a read instead.

P.S.: The plastic pages of the book were at first impressive and satisfyingly smooth to the touch, but it made the book very thick and heavy compared to paper-based 200-page books, not to mention how hard and sharp the edges felt.