Finding a New Balance between Industry and the Natural World

The modern environmental movement essentially dates from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, an unprecedented UN conference both in size and the scale of its concerns. Maurice Strong, the Conference Secretary-General, called the Summit a “historic moment for humanity.”

The Summit’s message – that only a complete transformation in our attitudes and behavior would bring about the changes necessary to safeguard the environment – was relayed around the world by some 10,000 journalists and heard by millions. Some 167 countries were represented.

That core message reflected the complexity of the world’s environmental problems; that both poverty and excessive consumption by affluent populations place damaging stress on the environment. The summit coined the phrase “eco-efficiency.” This, so it was hoped, would transform industry from a system that takes, makes, and wastes into one that integrates economic, environmental and ethical concerns. Essentially, eco-efficiency means doing more with less.

Eco-efficiency has been the guiding principle ever since. For many companies, it has meant assessing manufacturing and distribution processes and then finding ways to minimize their impacts on the environment - for example, by reducing waste or energy consumption. Eco-efficiency has achieved enormous environmental benefits.

More than anything, it has brought the environment into sharp focus, bringing with it a shared sense of our impact on the world around us. In a few short years we have collectively recognized the challenges of resource depletion and climate change and, as individuals, families, companies and governments, are doing something about it. But eco-efficiency doesn’t have all the answers because, effectively, it’s about being “less bad” and believing it to be inherently ethical.

In their influential book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, the German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough, write: “Relying on eco-efficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.” Crucially, eco-efficiency only slows down the rate of environmental damage and resource depletion.

Published in 2002, their book heralded a new and challenging philosophy on sustainability called Cradle to Cradle, whose central premise is that products should be conceived from the very start with intelligent design and the intention that they would eventually be recycled, in their entirety, as either ‘technical’ or ‘biological’ nutrients. It is therefore a philosophy that goes beyond eco-efficiency.

It models human industry on the natural world, in which materials are nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It’s a philosophy that uses nature as a template for how we can redesign everything that we do – including manufacturing industry – to be more eco-effective.

The scale of the environmental challenge is particularly significant in the flooring industry. Statistics from the United States suggest that carpeting is replaced on average every seven years, despite usually having a guaranteed life of between 10 and 25 years. That means that a lot of perfectly good carpeting is thrown away every year, because it’s faded or just feels dated.

According to a United Kingdom study carried out for the Contract Flooring Association, about 600,000 tonnes of carpet is thrown out in the UK every year. One estimate suggests that in the developed world, some 2% of landfill waste is made up from old carpeting. Multiply those statistics across the world and you can sense the scale of those wasted resources, when much of that material could be used again.

All major carpet companies now have policies in place to address issues of sustainability. For some manufacturers it has meant reducing waste at source by using “natural” materials such as wool or sustainable plant fibers – most commonly, sisal, cotton, seagrass, jute or coconut coir.

All major carpet companies now have policies in place to address issues of sustainability. For some manufacturers, apart from the mantra of reduce, recycle and reuse, it has also meant reducing waste at source by using “natural” materials such as wool or sustainable plant fibers – most commonly, sisal, cotton, seagrass, jute or coconut coir. For others, it’s been about using, for example, open-cell polyurethane foam in their carpet backing, a post-industrial waste from the automotive industry, an innovative way of reutilizing someone else’s rubbish.

Eco-efficiency has been an enormous step forward in galvanizing companies to think and behave in new ways. It has brought significant environmental advances – often from companies thinking laterally, and working collaboratively. For example, in the flooring sector, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic beverage bottles are now being recycled in their millions to make polyester carpet fibers. Only this year, plastic bottles from the U.S. Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the world, are now being sold to make carpet backing – in a mix of materials that also includes renewable soyabean and celceram, a refined material recovered from coal-fired power stations.

But for Desso and a growing number of manufacturing companies, it’s been about going beyond eco-efficiency to adopt eco-effectiveness: a philosophy that looks at manufacturing industry as regenerative rather than depletive, and designing goods that celebrate interdependence with other living systems. From an industrial design perspective, it means making products that work within a circular rather than a linear economy.

Cradle to Cradle

Cradle to Cradle sounds deceptively simple, but it actually turns conventional sustainability on its head, because convention is all about a language of negatives. The green convention talks about “minimizing” human impacts, “zero footprints,” “banning” harmful substances or “reducing” energy use.

Instead, Cradle to Cradle takes ethics out of the equation and paints an optimistic picture. It recognizes that bad and polluting products are not unethical, they are just poorly designed. Conversely, good and non-polluting products are not ethical, they are simply well designed.

In the living environment, materials are constantly being transformed without losing their capacity as nutrients; however, rotten apples are not recycled back into new apples: instead, they are transformed by chemical and other processes into nutrients for other organisms. In nature, nothing is wasted; everything is reused. As in nature, so can we do the same, using innovative supply chain management to use materials from one industry to support others, eliminating the concept of waste because all waste becomes tomorrow’s raw materials or nutrients.

A unified philosophy

Braungart and McDonough state that when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems – for example, the effectiveness of nutrient recycling, or the abundance of the sun’s energy – they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.

It is no less than a manifesto for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design; a positive agenda that says that, if we work with nature, the manufacturing sector can be truly good. Time magazine has called it “a unified philosophy that - in demonstrable and practical ways - is changing the design of the world.”

In 2007, Desso entered into partnership with the Hamburg-based Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA), the brainchild of Cradle to Cradle co-founder Michael Braungart. EPEA encourages companies to assess their activities on sustainability, recycling, waste management and energy use – and make improvements throughout.

We have worked with EPEA to first identify the “material health” of each component in our products; assess how each component can be recovered and recycled in a process of “material reutilization;” assess energy and water usage and, lastly, examine our policies on social responsibility and fair labor practices. Certification is available at several levels: basic, silver, gold, and platinum, with more stringent requirements at each stage. We intend that all our products will be designed and produced according to Cradle to Cradle design principles by 2020.