To create an enduring society, we need to devise a system of commerce and production in which each and every act is sustainable and restorative. Business will not be able to fulfill its social contract with the environment or society until the system in which it operates undergoes a fundamental change, a change that brings commerce and governance into alignment with the natural world. Because every act in an industrial society leads to further environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we need to imagine and then design a system of commerce in which the opposite is true, in which doing good is second nature, in which the natural, everyday acts of work and life cumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of altruism.
The prospect of a major redesign of our commercial system, while daunting, is exhilarating; it opens the doors to real long-term prosperity. It's daunting because the system we presently engage grew from linear "progress" built of incremental advances over a long period of time. It would be hard to describe our present industrialized, carbon-fuel system as a result of sophisticated analysis focused on the health of the greater whole. At the beginning of the industrial age, it was difficult to recognize the complexity and fragility of nature. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the 1830s, at the cusp of the industrial revolution, stated that "nature...refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf." We now know that even those are mutable, and we must incorporate that awareness into all systems of design, production, and activity if we truly seek prosperity.
At present the environmental movement consists of many different initiatives connected primarily by values and belief rather than by design. If design is the first signal of human intention, then a plan to create a sustainable future should realize its objectives through practical, clearly stated goals and strategies. For the record, we suggest the following as being fundamental to achieving commercial prosperity and environmental sanity:
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1. Goal: Eliminate the concept of waste.
It's no longer a question of what to do with our waste, but of how to make things so that there is no waste. Seminal to this principle is the understanding that pollution and toxicity are always and irrevocably products of inefficiency. They are not the inevitable outcome of human interaction with the environment but the built-in results of the design of our system. Designing manufacturing and living systems that create no waste is both economical and prosperous. It is more practical than industrialism, not less. When we examine the fundamental characteristics of nature, we see how the principle of waste equaling food permeates all natural systems. Everything is constantly cycled in nature. There is abundant waste in nature, just as there is in industry, but in nature waste constantly flows back into living systems. That principle is the key to true economics. Thus, whenever we design and make a product, the first question we have to ask is, Whose food will this product be when its present life is over?
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Strategy: Transform the making of things.
We have to institute the Intelligent Product System created by Michael Braungart of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency, in Hamburg, Germany. Under the system, there can be only three types of products, and eventually only two. The first are consumables, products that either are eaten or, when placed on the ground, turn into soil without any harmful side effects. In other words, they're products whose waste equals food for other living systems. At present many of the products that should be "consumable" are not. Cotton contains hundreds of chemicals, plasticizers, defoliants, pesticides, and dyes; shoes are tanned with chromium and shoe soles contain lead; and silk blouses contain zinc, tin, and toxic dyestuffs. On the other hand, products such as toothpaste tubes and other nonbiodegradable packaging can be made out of natural polymers so they can break down and become fertilizer for plants. Much of the recycling done today generates some toxic by-products and may consume more energy than it saves. We should be designing more things that can be thrown away -- but into the compost heap. Heretical it may seem, but designing for decomposition is the way of the world around us.
The second category is products of service. These are what are known as durables, such as cars, computers, TVs, VCRs, and refrigerators. These would never be sold, only licensed. They would always belong to the original manufacturer. That means they would be made, employed, and returned within a closed-loop system. This process is already being instituted in Germany -- and to a lesser extent in Japan -- where companies are beginning to design products for disassembly. If a company knows its products will come back someday and that it cannot throw anything away when they do, it creates a very different design and materials ethic.
Last, there are products Braungart calls unsalables -- radioactive material, heavy metals, and persistent toxins. There is no living system for which those are food, and thus they can never be thrown away. Unsalables would always belong to the original maker. They would be safeguarded by public utilities called Parking Lots, which would store the toxins in glass-lined barrels indefinitely, charging the original manufacturers rent for the privilege. The rent would cease when an independent scientific panel could confirm that there was a safe method to detoxify the substances in question. All toxic chemicals would have molecular markers identifying them as belonging to their originator -- such as Dow Chemical, Occidental Petroleum, or Du Pont -- so that if they were found in wells, rivers, soil, or fish, it would be the responsibility of the company to retrieve them, mitigate them, or clean them up. As with products of service, this would place the problem of toxicity with the makers, where it belongs, making them responsible for its full life-cycle effects.
