Pio Barone Lumaga, published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8
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Environmentalism has come up against a new wall: Why is eco-efficiency not good enough? The overwhelmingly majority of our environmental actions are guided by an ecoefficiency principle, which can be synthesized as getting more for less, fewer throwaways, reduced use of resources, and inflicting less harm in the process of attaining more products or services. Reducing and minimizing is commendable, but the compounded effect of a growing population and greater needs is accruing in a crescendo of waste to squander, of new poisons adding to an already lethal toxic scourge, and a befouling of what is already contaminated. The recycling mantra does not seem to be saving us. Today’s recycling has, in reality, turned into down cycling, where materials being re-processed lose their original qualities, often of a poorer standard, and are only suitable for downgraded applications, pre-destined for a landfill or an incinerator.

Apredatory culture of consumerism and production, built on a continuous flood of materials from cradle-tograve, has transformed precious resources into waste and the world into a burial ground. The Cradle-to- Cradle philosophy is a refreshing somersault of reason to apply to our collective and individual behavior, providing us with an alternative pragmatic line of conduct.

Everything we produce should be able to improve life and its quality for all species on earth. Four decades of environmental battles have succeeded merely in sporadically and spottily reducing the anthropogenic-human-effect on earth, as we face exponential population and strong economic growth. Admittedly, without these battles we would be in the midst of a larger environmental crisis and it is because of them that we can now try to assess what has worked well, partially, or not at all. We have managed to protect, but not enough. Today, species are disappearing at an ever-growing rate than in the past, and national legislations, if and when they exist, are insufficient to arrest the growing contamination of our land, water and air.

Here, I start this series of articles by asking some questions of Michael Braungart. His offices are on the fifth floor of Trostbrücke 4. We sit in a corner room overlooking the old Hamburg: under us the Elbe, a winding lifeless river, flows slowly between islands of grey mud punctuated with colorful plastic garbage. On a grey morning of a normal working day, a tall lanky middle-aged man comes in smiling, with his hands stretched to shake mine vigorously. His blond-gray unruly hair is rather long, he wears a white shirt, black jeans and black gym shoes. He talks in rapid bursts, looking straight into my eyes or touching, for confirmation, my arm. Eloquent and witty, he is one of the founders of the Chemistry Division of Greenpeace International. Shared values, environment battles, and age allow us to enter directly into the heart of the matter, without preambles.

Pio Barone Lumaga: For the public at large, eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness sound pretty similar. Could you tell us how they are different?

Michael Braungart: Eco-efficiency is a reactionary approach, a strategy for damage management and guilt reduction that doesn’t address the necessity of a fundamental redesign of the industrial material f lows. Traditionally, people define environment protection by destroying a little less. It is analogous to the German government saying “Please protect the environment, don’t use your car that often”, but that would be the same as saying, “Please protect your child, don’t beat your child that often.”

PBL: Are you suggesting that there is a perverse logic in efficiency versus inefficiency, kind of ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’?

MB: Well, a logic on the basis of which we can say that the former East Germany protected the environment far better than West Germany without any legislation, because they were not efficient. The East German system was so inefficient that they could not destroy all the wetland and, because of that, the species that could rest, nest, and survive turned out to be much higher in East Germany than in West Germany.

PBL: How about contamination? Is less bad, bad?

MB: In East Germany, contamination of the soil was much lower. Although they left a lot of contaminated spots, the system was much more intact, once again, a by-product of their inefficiency. So when you do something wrong, don’t make it efficient, because than it’s perfectly wrong. Consequently, it is not protection when you destroy a little less. ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’ is about how to be good instead of less bad. Because less bad is simply that, just less bad.

PBL: Could you give us an example?

MB: We have to look at how other systems work, for example, that of ants. On this planet, ants have a biomass about four times bigger than human beings. Because the ants’ life-span is so much shorter and they work physically so much harder than we do, they equal about 30 billion people in their consumption. Given this, we don’t need to apologize that we humans are here or that we are too many or look at children with worry. We don’t need to stigmatize overpopulation like Al Gore does. Every person can be beneficial instead of less bad.

PBL: Theresa Heinz, in the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of your co-authored book, The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability, [1] wrote, “The simple genius was that they reframed the issue … Why not just design products and institutions that support the environment? … As they write in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, [2] nature’s cycles are not just lean and efficient; they are abundant, effective and regenerative … The key insight of eco-effective or cradle-to-cradle thinking is recognizing the materials of our daily lives – even highly technical, synthetic industrial materials – can be designed to circulate in human systems very much like nitrogen, water and simple sugars circulate in nature’s nutrients cycles. Rather than using materials once and sending them to the landfill – our current cradle-to-grave system – cradle-to-cradle materials are designed to be returned safely to the soil or to flow back to industry to be used again and again.” Could you tell us about these two kind of nutrients and about toxic substances necessary for modern production?

MB: Yes, we can put everything that we consume and purchase back into the biosphere as biological nutrients. The first category of nutrients are natural, plant-based materials, biopolymers, and even synthetic substances that are safe for humans and natural systems.

We made an ice-cream package which is not only biodegradable, but liquefies at room temperature and contains seeds from real plants. When you throw it away, it will be really good and encourage biodiversity! The second category of nutrients are technical nutrients, including selected toxic ones, that remain safely inside a closed loop of production, recovery and reuse and are used within a service to the customer but remain the property of the manufacturer. To be clear, you cannot make energy saving windows without using toxic materials. On the other hand, you don’t consume that window, you only use it.

For example a TV, a washing machine or a window can be leased to the customer and after a designated period return to the company so that these materials can be recovered and used for a new product. Basically, you don’t even budge if we tell you “You don’t eat your TV, you only watch your TV.” But we identify ourselves with our TV. There are 4,360 different kinds of chemicals in a TV set. Do you really want to own them when you watch TV? Therefore, it is not fair to privatize the profit and to socialize the waste.

So ‘Cradle-to-Cradle’ is celebrating human genius, celebrating the human footprint instead of trying to minimize the footprint. But making everything beneficial, everything that is consumed is respected, like food that can go back into the biosphere. Other things, like a washing machine, TV set, or a window, are designated to go to the techno-sphere. That’s how we can celebrate human creativity instead of apologizing for being too many.

PBL: You led the formation of the Chemistry Division of Greenpeace International. There is a huge difference between the old environmental approach, which was more about defending, and the current pro-active approach. Sustainable has become today’s catchword, but isn’t sustainability just a beginning and a short-term approach?

MB: People were cutting down all the trees in central Europe, as an example, which generated huge soil erosion. But then they rebuilt the forest, which was good and sustainable. Look, we can only harvest in the future what crawls back from our present. But sustainable is just a minimum, like compostability – you are compostable, I am compostable, I am already born compostable. If you would go to your Swedish wife and say “Our relationship is sustainable,” she would be sorry because the minimum is not enough. Life is too short to be merely sustainable. Lifetime expectancy is thirty years – everything beyond thirty is due to human creativity, just like art, architecture, design, medicine or chemistry. So we don’t have to apologize for being here but we can learn from nature. We are just stupid for doing things nature never does. Take, for example, breast-feeding babies. We have found around accumulations of 1,500 to 2,000 chemicals in breast-milk, such a vast quantity that breast-milk could never be sold as drinking milk because it is so toxic. Therefore, it would not be so esoteric to suggest that a mother should not breastfeed any longer than six to eight months, because beyond that it would not be good for the baby.

PBL: These chemicals in the breast milk, are they substances found in the air or in our buildings?

MB: Yes, if you are stupid enough to make buildings with indoor air quality that is 3 to 10 times worse than the outside air. Nothing in such buildings is designed to be reused. So nature is not stupid, nature never makes things that accumulate. So it is all human made substances that we find here and they interact which each other. The single chemical is not the problem, but the compounded action of these chemicals together is. Nature always makes things that are reversible, while we make things that stay in the environment for ever and accumulate and that is stupid. We can learn from nature but we don’t need to romanticize nature either.

PBL: Is Al Gore an environmental fundamentalist, when he affirms unfoundedly that the sea level will rise 30 feet, or a moralist when he addresses climate changes as an ethical problem?

MB: Al Gore was eight years in power and didn’t do anything. Then he makes a film which shows what I already knew in kindergarten. He says that the greenhouse effect is an ethical problem. But the Germans, like everybody else, forget about ethics immediately. When we are afraid or in a crisis, we forget about ethics. It is not an ethical problem – the greenhouse effect and the environment constitute problem of quality. A building which is not healthy is not good for the people who live in it. It is a quality problem. When you think about quality, you realize the entirety of the crisis. We will not solve this through an ethical approach that considers the environment a luxury and believes that the first need is to first stabilize the human population. That means looking at every child and thinking “it would be better if you wouldn’t be here!” That doesn’t lead to creativity.

THE HANNOVER PRINCIPLES [2]

Just over a decade ago, when the City of Hannover, Germany, asked us to develop a set of design principles for the 2000 World’s Fair, design for sustainability was in its infancy . The Hannover Principles were conceived to lay the foundation for this hopeful, new paradigm. We knew at the time that our efforts were just a first step. Though we were striving to identify universal principles based on the enduring laws of nature, we also understood that our knowledge of the world was incomplete. So, too, was our ability to predict all the many ways in which the creativity of the world’s designers, architects, business leaders, and NGOs would push design for sustainability beyond the limits we could imagine in 1992. Thus, we saw the Principles as a living document – a set of enduring ideals and an open system of thought that would evolve as it was put into practice.

1. Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.

2. Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.

3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement, including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.

4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to co-exist.

5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.

6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.

7. Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.

8. Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.

9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.

[1] The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability - Tenth Anniversary Edition, William McDonough & Michael Braungart, William McDonough & Partners, 2003.

[2] Cradle To Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough & Michael Braungart, North Point Press, 2002.

This article was published in LOFT The Nordic BOOKAZINE Volume #8. It was written by Pio Barone Lumaga the editor of LOFT The Nordic Bookazine.