The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance Author: Visit Amazon's William McDonough Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0865477485 | Format: EPUB
The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance Description
From Booklist
With their landmark work on designing zero-waste merchandise, Cradle to Cradle (2002), architect McDonough and chemist Braungart launched a revolutionary program that encourages manufacturers to substitute environmentally unfriendly products with those that generate as few toxic footprints as possible. In consulting for corporations as far afield as Ford and Nike, the pair has demonstrated that nonpolluting goods, from carpets to shoes, can win consumers over without sacrificing the bottom line. Now the authors take their sustainability philosophy an inspired step further, arguing that industries can do better than simply trimming down the garbage and instead become “part of the natural cycle of regeneration on the planet.” Drawing on multiple examples from nature’s endless food chain, where one creature’s waste becomes nutrition for others, McDonough and Braungart debunk the notion that ecological measures inevitably steal profits from business and joy from life. The authors’ many reports on industry innovators give readers a peek into a future where mankind might one day stop destroying the environment and, instead, add to its abundance. --Carl Hays
Review
Praise for Cradle to Cradle
“Asking how a cherry tree would design an energy-efficient building is only one of the creative ‘practices’ that McDonough and Braungart spread before their readers. This book will give you renewed hope that, indeed, ‘it is darkest before the dawn.’” —Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club
“[McDonough and Braungart are] masters of holistic environmentalism . . . [They] have a knack for combining big ideas with commonsense practicality, which leaves readers feeling excited about the future.” —Bruce Barcott, Outside Magazine
See all Editorial Reviews
- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: North Point Press (April 16, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0865477485
- ISBN-13: 978-0865477483
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
If you are already familiar with the work of Bill McDonough ("BM") and Michael Braungart ("MB", together "BMMB"), then my glowing praise should come as no surprise and you can probably stop reading my review and go get your copy now. As a bioentrepreneur running a company, I am well read on current thinking involving sustainability, biomimicry, biology, and futurism. All the same I just checked out and devoured this book in a day. My high expectations were not disappointed, and the marathon read spurred my creativity not just in business but all the way through the cycle down to my family life, which was the intention.
In 1992 BMMB publicly presented the "Hannover Principles", a sustainability manifesto which advocates transcending basic design principles by also considering the impact on health and the environment, how the design impacts things on the periphery and identifying those relationships, eliminating waste and optimizing efficiency, and striving to holistically improve the end product. Together they identified and analyzed thousands of industrial materials and produced a ranking system that delineated their qualities along the lines of toxicity and true recyclable sustainability (as opposed to "downcycling", or reusing the materials of a primary product to produce something else with less and less quality/utility in the future). This work led to a major series of high level consultations producing a "butterfly effect" that is positively impacting us all, and will continue to do so ad infinium.
Ten years later they wrote "Cradle to Cradle", which looked at how products could be made better by applying the Hannover Principles, and that doing so would make companies more profitable.
C2C and The Upcycle
William McDonough, an American architect, and Michael Braungart, a German chemist, combined to write Cradle to Cradle (C2C). C2C, published in 2002, discusses product design, with emphasis on materials utilization efficiency in an environmental context. C2C proposes that product design consider negative effects, especially toxicity, to humans and the natural world at every step in the product's value chain, including disposition when the product is no longer useful. In essence, C2C goes beyond "cradle to grave" design, which ends at a landfill or an incinerator, to "cradle to cradle" design, where non-toxic materials are reclaimed, recycled or reused in generation after generation of products.
Recently, the same two authors published The Upcycle. The Upcycle isn't really a sequel to C2C. Rather, as its title implies, it is an expansion on C2C, based on experience -- in this case, two decades of experience. Think of The Upcycle as another generation of the same product, rather like release 1.0 and release 2.0 of a software package.
Here are a few of the key ideas from The Upcycle:
>> More good, rather than less bad: The general approach to environmental impacts and human well-being is to do less bad -- reduce atmospheric emissions, reduce industrial accidents and reduce waste to landfill, for example. The Upcycle asserts that reduction, even reduction to zero, isn't sufficient. Production should aim beyond shrinking its negative footprint on the world to producing an increasing positive footprint.
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