One of the most important concepts with which we
culminated the class the other day was the concept of waste equals food or in
other words the cradle to cradle mentality. From my point of view in order to finish or achieve a
perfect cycle of matter instead of the linear one that stops at the landfills
or incinerators, we need not only to recycle more, but also to design a new
operating system that revolves around the natural world. We need to aim towards green engineering for the mere reason that any of the models that we have
currently are considered a long-term waste disposal system: the incinerators (if we
take into consideration that toxic emissions are unsustainable too in the
long-run), and the landfills are represented as an infinite waste accumulation.
Our current system is based from the fundamentals of the Industrial Revolution,
and back then they didn’t really stop to think about the long-term consequences
of production in the future, since the only thing that mattered then was producing
in large quantities, creating new stuff and newer inventions without
restrictions, in order to progress. Now however, to make real progress we
should start designing and envision a system that doesn’t lead towards an
entropic world, but towards the
sustainable cycle that we talked about at the beginning of the month.
Sustainablity: The Cradle-to-Cradle Perspective
The Cradle-to-Cradle Framework does not reach
for sustainability as it is typically defined. Discussed at length in various
papers, books and other venues, environmental sustainability in the industrial
sector is popularly understood as a strategy of "doing more with
less" or "reducing the human footprint" to minimize troubling
symptoms of environmental decline. From an engineering perspective,
conventional sustainability too often suggests retrofitting the machines of
industry with cleaner, more efficient "engines" to secure ongoing
economic growth. But this is not an adequate long-term goal. While being
eco-efficient may indeed reduce resource consumption and pollution in the
short-term, it does not address the deep design flaws of contemporary industry.
Rather, it addresses problems without addressing their source, setting goals
and employing practices that sustain a fundamentally flawed system.
The
Cradle-to-Cradle Framework, on the other hand, posits a new way of designing
human systems that ultimately can solve rather than alleviate the human-created
conflicts between economic growth and environmental health that result from
poor design and market structure. Within this principled framework, which is
based on the manifested rules of nature and re-defines the problem at hand,
eco-efficient strategies can serve a larger purpose.
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