DESIGN is the first signal of human intention.
That is the thesis of the architect William McDonough. In 2002, together with chemist Michael Braungart, he co-authored the seminal design framework Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.[i] The book is a practical manifesto for a world in which waste is largely eliminated from our lives.
William McDonough set out a vision for an economy in which everything is designed as a foundational resource for something else. It is a world in which waste is food. When something comes to the end of its natural life it can become the start of something else – either returning as nutrients to the soil or as a material to be used to create new products.
More than two decades on from McDonough’s thesis, the world has yet to fulfil the glittering potential of a cradle-to-cradle economy. And as a result, so often materials are allowed to leach from the productive economy to become biological pollutants – with no hard-stop between the two. Sadly, materials useful in the technical cycle can have a ruinous effect on the most precious natural elements of the biological cycle.
Microplastic pollution is a perfect example of this. There are now over 170 trillion microplastic particles (plastic particles less than five millimetres) in the ocean[ii] – more than there are stars in the Milky Way. Microplastics are allowed to leach into the ocean from a range of sources. The leading cause of ocean microplastics is textile microfibres – with some 35 per cent of the primary microplastics that enter global seas taking this journey to the ocean.
The consequences for the environment are profound. Microplastics damage world oceans – a global commons that absorbs more carbon than all the plants on Earth combined and produces most of the Earth’s oxygen.
It’s clear bio-health is interwoven with human health. And so, like many technical materials, microplastics can have a poisonous effect on human wellbeing. Microplastics have been linked to a whole host of human health problems. Microplastics carry chemicals that are “causing cancer, mutations to DNA, have toxic reproductive effects, metabolic disorders, affect neurodevelopment, endocrine disruption and can affect the nervous system.”[iii] And microplastics too have been found in human blood and the lungs, and can breach the blood-brain barrier.
Taking place this week (August 2, 2023), Earth Overshoot Day is billed as the “date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what nature can regenerate in that year.”[iv] So often well-intentioned campaigners suggest that tackling the microplastic crisis – or indeed any other profound environmental issue – is simply a matter of becoming more efficient in the proliferation and consumption of resources. But this is a theory that suggests nature and the economy will always be counter-opposing forces.
Humanity will never be able to design an economy as efficient or perfectly circular as the one that nature has created for us. This means perhaps the greatest opportunity in engineering in the 2020s and beyond is to create an economy that emulates nature and is truly regenerative by design. And it means designing products and services whose waste becomes food for something new in the future. It is about creating an economy when one product’s waste is food for a new product. This in turn will create a perpetual loop of growth, decline, and rebirth.
Creating a cradle-to-cradle economy is the most innovative thing humankind can do. This is my cri de Coeur for a fundamental shift in the way we design the world in front of us. Waste is food.
Adam Root, CEO of Matter .
[i] https://mcdonough.com/cradle-to-cradle/
[ii] A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required | PLOS ONE
[iii] A Detailed Review Study on Potential Effects of Microplastics and Additives of Concern on Human Health - PMC (nih.gov)
First seven members join NG’s Great Grid Partnership
Agreed. It is all pretentious posturing and trite branding with no meaning or gravitas. Prepare to be disappointed by all of these greats/grates.