Reinventing the World Using Our Brains

 Cradle to Cradle, by McDonough and Braungart expresses a fresh positive view into how to change the environmental situation we see today. They argue that so many products are made to be thrown away. He questions why we can’t use human ingenuity and creativity to produce products that can be continually reused and products that do not tremendously deplete natural resources. A pretty shocking statistic that shows the extreme wastefulness of the current system is that what we see in our garbage cans are only 5% of the raw materials actually used to create and distribute these products. He also expresses issues with recycling, and how it is only slowing down the process of environmental degradation but not solving anything. As items are recycled they become of less quality and then must be processed a lot to get back to a good quality material. This process, they term downcycling, is one of the many inefficient ineffective processes we use to attempt to help the environmental situation.

McDonogh and Braungart seek to change the current vision of eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness. They see this by changing the way items are created, what they are made of, and so forth. His book is a living example of this as it is not made from degrading the forest, but it is made from a plastic that can forever be recycled, without being downcycled. Although I completely agree with their push towards eco-effectiveness, I do however believe there should be a shift in the way people consume. Cradle to Cradle explains that consumption is not really a problem, the problem is how the products are made. Overconsumption itself is a type of disease and no matter how perfect our products are, will always contribute to pollution and waste. I definitely believe that in addition to eco-effectiveness, there needs to be an eradication of overconsumption. Overall I feel that if a decent amount of large companies get on board with creating more eco-effective products, it could tremendously impact the environmental situation we see today. This however will be a challenging feat, but nevertheless plausible.