Cradle to Cradle: (Patterns of the Planet) by Michael Braungart & William McDonough

Author:Michael Braungart & William McDonough [Braungart, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Monstrous Hybrids

Mountains of waste rising in landfills are a growing concern, but the quantity of these wastes—the space they take up—is not the major problem of cradle-to-grave designs. Of greater concern are the nutrients—valuable “food” for both industry and nature—that are contaminated, wasted, or lost. They are lost not only for lack of adequate systems of retrieval; they are lost also because many products are what we jokingly refer to as “Frankenstein products” or (with apologies to Jane Jacobs) “monstrous hybrids”—mixtures of materials both technical and biological, neither of which can be salvaged after their current lives.

A conventional leather shoe is a monstrous hybrid. At one time, shoes were tanned with vegetable chemicals, which were relatively safe, so the wastes from their manufacture posed no real problem. The shoe could biodegrade after its useful life or be safely burned. But vegetable tanning required that trees be harvested for their tannins. As a result, shoes took a long time to make, and they were expensive. In the past forty years, vegetable tanning has been replaced with chromium tanning, which is faster and cheaper. But chromium is rare and valuable for industries, and in some forms it is carcinogenic. Today shoes are often tanned in developing countries where few if any precautions are taken to protect people and ecosystems from chromium exposure; manufacturing wastes may be dumped into nearby bodies of water or incinerated, either of which distributes toxins (often disproportionately in low-income areas). Conventional rubber shoe soles, moreover, usually contain lead and plastics. As the shoe is worn, particles of it degrade into the atmosphere and soil. It cannot be safely consumed, either by you or by the environment. After use, its valuable materials, both biological and technical, are usually lost in a landfill.

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