Cradle To Cradle
For a while now, I’ve been hearing about a book called Cradle to Cradle. In fact, it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, borrowed from a friend of mine.
This book is cool in a few different ways.
- Firstly, it’s made of plastic. Which means you can actually hold it under the tap & it won’t get wet. (The downside is the book is bloody heavy.)
- Secondly, the ink washes off when heated (don’t leave the book in the sun in your car, then, I suspect).
- Thirdly, and this combines the first two points: if you heat it, and wash off the ink (seeing as it’s waterproof), you have a purely plastic book without toxins. Which means it’s 100% re-usable!
The cool thing about the cradle to cradle philosophy is that if we would design all of the products we use (including our shoes, clothes, buildings, plastic bottles etc.) to be re-used 100%, we would be living in a sustainable world. So the basic idea is “Let’s make things that we can completely re-use again”. Kind of like the rest of nature. Everything that is ever used or born or eaten or processed on this planet (except for the junk we humans make) eventually gets reused. Manure becomes fertilizer, bones become dust, dead plants become fertile soil over time.
The reason a cradle to cradle concept is necessary is because we are fast using up all of our natural resources (as I have mentioned earlier on this blog). And this is something we need to stop doing pretty quickly, otherwise we will go the way of the Buffalo. Actually, if we don’t watch out, we’ll go the way of the Dodo. Totally extinct & ridiculous to boot.
Anyway, I could try to explain this idea, but others have done it much better than I have. Here is one of the creators of the cradle to cradle concept talking about it on TED.org (if you’ve never been there before you should go there now!)
And here is a 50 minute documentary on cradle to cradle on Google video’s
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