RR03

       Cradle to Cradle is such a unique and innovative book that continues to amaze me. To compare what our civilization has done over the past hundred or so years to today environmentally and ecologically is amazing and at times, even disturbing. I liked the point McDonough made about reusing our products. The idea that during the Great Depression and WWI, as a nation humans saved and reused objects such a jars, jugs and aluminum foil. This concept of reusing everyday, ordinary objects seems so far fetched from the plastic and tupperware products we use today. My take is that during the war or the depression we were so concerned about reusing these items because of the thought of saving our dollar. We did not do this because it was environmentally sound, or helped keep the waste in our landfills to a minimum. We did it because a jar made of glass was so expensive, we kept the jar washed it out and reused it instead. Today this concept seems ridiculous. The boom of the industrial revolution made these products much cheaper to produce, it became less profitable to save something compared to buying something new. In this day and age, if something durable, such as a toaster or oven were to break, we would simply throw it "away". I think about this and it makes me sick to my stomach. Why do we all have this backwards way of thinking? Why do we as a society only think about convenience or affordability before the environment? Will our ways of thinking ever change or reverse order?
     Which brings me to my next interesting observation. There is no away. Humans do not have the capability to actually throw their waste somewhere, it must go some place. And the only scary part about all of this waste is not the growing amount of it in the landfills, but rather the valuable material in the landfills that is completely lost. I think the concept of "waste equals food" to be extremely interesting and one hundred percent true. If we are just throwing away products and materials that could easily be turned into something new or refurbished there is no point to just be adding to the already monstrous landfill and creating more. Another fact I found astonishing was the number of chemicals in normal household products. For example McDonough mentioned the television having 4,360 chemicals, some of those chemicals even being toxic. Yet it is amazing to read that innovators as far back as Henry Ford thought to reuse their shipping containers for their product. I was shocked to read that the crates that shipped the Model A trucks became the vehicle's floor boards. How innovative! Especially for his time. Today, only a few producers are just now getting back into the groove of reusing products like Ford did in his shipping equipment. What took so long and why did innovative and ecological design ever stop? The nomadic cultures had it right. Once you use a bit of land, you need to re-cultivate it and let it regrow. They barely ever wasted. Whatever designers or producers create in today's world, needs to somehow be able to give back. It needs to be reused, recreated or refurbished. We need to stop believing that there is a place called "away".