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Simply Reducing Waste Is Not Good Enough

February 2005

Michael Braungart

Braungart

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—At first, it sounds like a logical design concept that any environmentalist would embrace: Use only raw materials that can be recycled to minimize the amount of waste put back into the environment.

But when Michael Braungart came to Stanford to outline the Cradle-to-Cradle design paradigm he has championed, he made clear that his revolutionary ideas are at odds with much of the prevailing thought about sustainability.

While many green design movements speak of using fewer "bad"materials that are toxic to the earth, Braungart calls for focusing on using nothing but "good" materials. When it comes to toxic waste, his stand is uncompromising: "Less bad is no good."

Bristling at the notion of using the law to regulate more ethical environmental practices, he argues that one person's ethics can create another person's dictatorship.

And, while ecologically minded individuals have traditionally spoken interns of efficient manufacturing, Braungart maintains they ought to be celebrating abundance.

"Efficiency is ugly," he said during a talk sponsored by the Business and Sustainability Group at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in conjunction with the School's Center for Social Innovation.

"Think about falling in love with someone efficiently. Think about efficient sex," Braungart said.

Co-author of a book on Cradle-to-Cradle design and founder of design firm sin the United States and his native Germany that help businesses follow these principles, Braungart offered the example of the cherry tree to show how manufacturers might imitate nature to design with abundance that results in beauty rather than toxic waste.

"Think of a cherry tree blossoming in spring. Nobody says, 'What a waste, for just a handful of cherries,'" Braungart said.

At times during his address he sounded more like a poet than a scientist who has worked as a consultant for international corporations from Volkswagen to Nike and Ford. But Braungart sees beauty in science. His overriding design principle is that nature has provided all the raw materials needed to create products that are beautiful and functional without being wasteful. When they are used properly, they can be used abundantly.

What Our Ancestors Knew
History is full of stories of cultures that intuitively understood this. When Native American people killed buffalo, they made use of just about every part of the animal from its meat to its hide to its bones so that almost no waste remained. And for centuries China's agrarian people have extracted nutrients from everything that grows in the rice field: not just the rice but the snakes and snails as well.

Braungart believes modern cultures have to relearn such ancient principles.

Two years ago he worked with Shaw Industries, the world's largest carpet manufacturer, which committed to using only products that could be broken down and used again. Today, Shaw effectively returns carpet to carpet rather than sending it to the landfill.

He also consulted with furniture maker Herman Miller Inc. on the creation of the Mirra Chair, a stylish and ergonomic office chair made completely of reusable components that has turned out to be one of most profitable products in the company's history.

Despite these successes, Braungart said most manufacturers have a long way togo. They need to replace concerns over cost with thoughts of justice for the world and all its citizens. And they need to redefine aesthetics in terms of what he calls "ecological intelligence."

"If people lose their lives making it, it is just not beautiful," he said.

If that sounds like another logical statement, most manufacturers do not live by it, Braungart said. To the contrary, wasteful practices that extract natural resources from the land and return them as toxic landfill continue to be the norm. Toy makers build dolls with plastics that are inexpensive but decompose into cancer-causing agents. Car manufacturers boast about removing one toxic agent like asbestos, only to replace it with a material that is less well known but even more harmful. Makers of all sorts of large equipment like cars and computers routinely smelt together non-compatible metals so that it is impossible to recycle them at the end of the product's life.

Lest all this sounds like abstract theory, Braungart came equipped with a pile of facts, figures, and graphic photos to demonstrate how toxic materials being put back into the environment are doing real harm.

Some 4.5 million children die each year due to lack of access to clean drinking water, he said, and more whales die from exposure to plastics in the ocean than for any other reason.

Referencing the multitude of manufacturers that return toxins back into the earth, he said, "If you're looking for weapons of mass destruction, here they are."

—Andrea Orr