Matthew Sweet: All this week we’ve been running a series called Extreme Green, our investigation into what’s going on at the verdant edge of environmentalism. Tonight we’re going to wrap things up with Michael Braungart, a German scientist who had a vision of the future in which nothing ever ends up in a land fill because, as in nature, no waste product is ever truly wasted. He calls the idea ‘cradle to cradle’ and he joins me now on the phone from Holland to explain the idea. Michael, cradle to cradle as I understand it this is about reshaping industry to make it mimic the processes of nature, is that right?
Michael Braungart: Yes, it means ‘to reinvent everything’ so either that things can go back in a biological cycle like shoe soles, like brake pads, like food, like detergent. It’s designed to be good for the biosphere or everything else we use just like a washing machine, like a TV set, like a radio - you don’t consume a TV set. Everything is designed to be beneficial for the technosphere so everything is either a biological nutrient or technical nutrient. Look at ants for example, we don’t have an over population problem. When we learn how to be as intelligent like ants, their biomass is about four times higher than of human beings and they are not an environmental problem because all the materials are designed to be beneficial to go back into the biosphere, and the same we can do with the technosphere because you can put metals, glass, plastics in a way that you can put them back into endless technical cycles again. There is no waste. But it’s not waste minimisation, it’s to eliminate the thinking of waste because human beings aren’t the only species on this planet to make waste and we give that up, we make things far more intelligent and then it generates endless innovation.
Matthew Sweet: So can you give an example of this cradle to cradle design in action, some example that you know of?
Michael Braungart: Yes. Let’s take an office furniture…office chair for example, made in UK. Every material is designed that it’s a technical nutrient because you don’t consume your chair, you just use it, and therefore the chair is designed that every material can go back in the technical nutrient cycle. So we do no longer sell a chair, you just sell an insurance for healthy sitting. And so after, let’s say seven thousand hours to sit on the chair, the chair goes back and becomes a technical nutrient for a new chair. So it’s no longer about durability, it’s about defined use periods that these materials can be nutrients forever.
Matthew Sweet: It sounds a very utopian idea this idea that manufacturing industry could nourish nature, nourish the world in some way rather than just consuming its resources.
Michael Braungart: Yes. But it’s not about being less bad, it’s about being good. Right now we think we protect the environment when we destroy a little less. It’s like if I would say “protect the environment don’t use your car today”, but it would be the same if I would say “protect your child, beat your child only five times instead of ten times”. No, we want to do systems and we already do, we already have about six to eight hundred products on the market in different areas where you just…
Matthew Sweet: What kind of products?
Michael Braungart: Oh, like, for example, biological nutrients, like the new Airbus 380 has our edible fabrics in it because we choose all the ingredients for the fabrics on the furniture in the new Airbus 380, the Mega air bus, that you can have healthy indoor air quality that you could even eat this fabric instead of…right now normal fabrics are hazardous waste when they’re used in airplanes because of flame retardance or whatever. We choose all ingredients positively that these materials could be even eaten because people actually…when they sit on such fabrics they actually consume it, they eat it, they inhale it, they have it in the air, they breath it. So we choose…we use thirty years of blame and shame now to make far far better things which don’t compete with China because we put the product quality…the filters at the beginning instead of filters at the end.
Matthew Sweet: So how much interest are you getting in this idea? Who’s coming to you to talk about it?
Michael Braungart: It’s interesting, the middle management in companies has been doing…reducing, avoiding guilt management now for more than twenty years and they don’t like it because they have been trying to be less bad but the top management…so they have to be efficient, but the top management needs to be effective so they need to think what do we do in the next ten years, in the next twenty years, how can we make use of the environmental debate to make far better product quality. So we call it total beauty. It’s not beautiful when it’s toxic, when it’s dangerous. So there is a big interest. I am here in Holland right now because there’s a whole region here in Venlo in southern Netherlands, who want all the companies and all the companies and all the people there want to become a cradle to cradle region and make all their stuff in a way to be good for the biosphere or the technosphere.
Matthew Sweet: Thanks very much indeed Michael Braungart. Now, its time to broaden the discussion out a bit. Over the week we’ve heard about living without an electricity supply, about living in eco houses called Earth Ships and now we’ve had a vision of the future that Michael’s explained to us in which industry behaves like a natural eco system. So are these fringe ideas, or do they have applications for the rest of us, and are there designers and architects out there who think they’re worth putting into practice? To answer those questions I’m joined by Antonia Ward who’s Head of Design Knowledge at the Design Council and the architecture critic Hugh Pearman. Okay Antonia I want you to pretend that you’re on Dragon’s Den, which one of the ideas that we’ve heard this week would you be backing, would you be putting your money into?
Antonia Ward: Definitely the cradle to cradle ideas. The chair that he was talking about there is a fascinating piece of design not just because of the way that the materials can be taken back into the biosphere, but also the way its designed is that it can be disassembled in five minutes using only a screwdriver. Now that’s a key piece of design thinking that happened at the very beginning and that’s what we need to be thinking about.
Matthew Sweet: I must say I do like the idea of eating the upholstery on air planes, it sounds rather more appetising than the food doesn’t it?
Antonia Ward: But you can’t have black fabric if you have that edible fabric. The one colour that they can’t do with that system is black. So we live without black chairs, I think we’ll live.
Matthew Sweet: Okay, Hugh, do you agree with this? Is this the one that you would go for as well?
Hugh Pearman: Yes. I’d like it to be explained more actually because um, I think I’ll be the ignorant listener on this one. How do you receive something back into the biosphere? What does that mean? Does it mean that absolutely everything has a further use or can be fully recycled or what?
Matthew Sweet: As I understand it means that there is no waste product at the end, so that products become infinitely recyclable.
Antonia Ward: It’s the idea that in nature waste equals food, and that can be food for animals or for systems or for society.
Matthew Sweet: Antonia, how easy is it to turn an idea like this, or any idea that we’ve heard from the sort of radical edge of things into something that’s more widely applicable?
Antonia Ward: Oh, I think it’s extremely easy. I think it takes thought and I think it takes innovation. I don’t think you can expect to apply this thinking into this current systems and society that we have now seamlessly. I think you have to…the ideas that you talk about with cradle to cradle manufacturing, you have to ask people who consume products to be in a contract with the people who make them, you don’t…its not a single transaction that I’d buy a chair, I go away, I then throw it away. You have to then talk to the manufacturer and say “will you take this back when I’m finished with it?”
Matthew Sweet: Hugh, how important do you think the innovators like the ones we’ve heard on the programme this week are in shaping what happens in the mainstream culture? How much influence do they exert?
Hugh Pearman: Well, we’re at a very interesting time right now in that the um, everybody accepts the principal of this, and, you know, to find a dissenter, you know, unless you’re I don’t know what, somebody who just does it for the hell of it, a Jeremy Clarkson figure say, but generally speaking anybody would accept the principle then the question comes “well how can we back it up”, so for instance, in architecture, you know, there’s a huge green agenda in architecture, the whole notion of everything from embodied energy through to life cycle costing, anything…
Matthew Sweet: What’s embodied energy?
Hugh Pearman: How much it costs to make the things that you…how much it costs in energy terms to make a brick say, or, you know, a steel beam or anything else like that, that’s in the building, concrete, a lot of energy is involved. If you can make for instance a building with minimal amounts of energy and it might be just using earth as we heard earlier this week or old tyres or something, then that’s good. A lot of that is there in the current thinking in the design of buildings, what everybody is desperate to find are actually systems and products which they can then just specify and say that’s what you do, that’s how you do it, these are the things you use, and we’re only at the beginning of that. Increasingly we’re getting to be more and more and more stuff and more and more ways of doing things but, there’s a lot of good will and at the moment actually industry is not, you know, quite keeping up with that.
Matthew Sweet: Would you agree with that Antonia? I mean, how is the…how are things playing out in Britain because, you know, certainly we have the picture that there are a lot of enthusiastic pioneers in Britain, but maybe in Europe governments take this sort of thing more seriously and maybe these systems are already beginning to come into place?
Antonia Ward: I’m not sure it’s for government, I think it’s for consumers to demand more, I mean consumers have demanded lots for the last few years, they’ve demanded choice, they’ve demanded convenience and they’ve got both of those, you know, if we demanded conscience right now I’m sure we would get it.
Matthew Sweet: But how would they know what to demand?
Antonia Ward: Ah, that’s where design comes in you see. What you need to do is to be able to understand what it is…what do people actually want. There’s no point being told to stop to consume less, to do less. The Design Council’s got a piece of work going on in the North East at the moment called Designs of the Time where we’re saying to a whole community “how do you want to live, what do you want to do?” and that’s getting designers to work with the people who use systems, buildings, products and say “what is it that you really want?”. It’s like the designer Bruce Mau says, now that we can make everything, what are we going to make?
Matthew Sweet: Hugh, do you think governments have a role to play in making technology, making design cleaner?
Hugh Pearman: I think they can sort of help tip people towards wanting to do things more and generally speaking what that means is making people feel they can afford to make a step in this direction, you know. We’ve all probably all looked at the idea of “Hey, what if I do cover the roof of my house with photovoltaic panels, generate my own power, how would that stack up?” Well the way it stacks up it will cost you twenty thousand pounds, it’ll cost you about…it’ll take you about thirty years to get payback on it. Other countries in Europe have got a much more beneficial tax system which gives incentives for people to actually consume less electricity pumped out by power stations.
Matthew Sweet: And do you think any of the people who we’ve heard this week are helping to move that process on?
Hugh Pearman: It’s beginning to get to the point now where, you need a major, for instance, housing developer to completely commit to that way of thinking. Enough people in individual houses and exemplar developments around the place, er, time for a Wimpy or a Barratt or somebody like that to actually embrace that whole idea. Haven’t done it yet.
Matthew Sweet: Well, what about that question Antonia because this is something, as Hugh said, there’s nobody who really says “this is a terrible idea” are there, but at the moment most of us seem, just seem content to read about it in the Sunday papers and coo over images of this rather than actually doing anything about it. Are these figures, are these projects just objects of curiosity at the moment do you think?
Antonia Ward: No I don’t think so, I mean I think what needs to happen is as well as the exemplar developments from the Wimpys and the Barratts, there also need to be systems which allow you, if you live in a terraced house in Hackney, to see what you can do to minimise your carbon footprint in the same way that if you bought a new build.
Matthew Sweet: But aren’t some of the ideas, Hugh, that we’ve heard, the off-grid idea, lets talk about that, the idea that one should disconnect one’s self from the water supply, from the electricity supply. Aren’t they alienatingly radical and perhaps pointlessly radical? Maybe instead of encouraging people to opt out of the national grid, of the water supply, perhaps they should be encouraged to use electricity and water in a less profligate way. There seems to be this kind of year zero thing that I imagine a lot of people find rather off putting.
Hugh Pearman: I’m not so bothered about…I don’t see that as being a problem. Its only about eighty years ago when being off-grid was normal, you know, you’d get people who build little bungalows, they’d get water off the roof, they had sort of, you know, I don’t know what, they’d light a fire. It doesn’t matter. The difference now is that we consume much more power. I don’t see that’s necessarily a problem if, firstly, your appliances are sort of as efficient as they can be and secondly if your off-grid house can generate the power that’s necessary, you’re then back in a neutral position and that’s okay. I think however that it’s perhaps a little bit optimistic to imagine everybody doing that in our densely packed city, however, the main problem, particularly with things like water resources as we know, are the suburban estate townships on the edges of market towns, that’s where it could be done very effectively and I don’t think it would be a particular problem.
Matthew Sweet: And what about the cradle to grave idea Antonia, I mean you were expressing enthusiasm for that. How applicable is that idea, I mean could you imagine what a cradle to cradle lap top would be like for instance, or a cradle to cradle car?
Antonia Ward: Absolutely, I mean I think what we need though is the information to enable us to make a choice. We have labelling on food where we know where food comes from now because consumer demand for food miles has asked for it, but we don’t have power ratings or product or materials information on a PC, you don’t know what its made of, you don’t know how to take it apart, you don’t know where to send the bits to be recycled or if they can, you don’t know how to upgrade it.
Matthew Sweet: And what about cradle to cradle architecture Hugh, if you’ve got enough of a grip on the concept now, the idea of a house or a tower block being completely recyclable, reusable?
Hugh Pearman: The best way to have a completely recyclable building is to have a building which doesn’t need to be recycled. A building which just stays there for two hundred and fifty years. That’s the way to do it.
Matthew Sweet: So what’s the most radical green innovation that you know of that’s actually at work in the world today Hugh, one that you might suspect would become a large part of our lives over the next ten or twenty years, what’s your prediction?
Hugh Pearman: In my field its buildings which are made of waste, be that waste from other industrial processes or be that waste which you find around you in terms of earth, sand or whatever, that’s the simplest way to… without embodied energy.
Matthew Sweet: And do designers and architects want to work with waste?
Hugh Pearman: Oh they do, they do and actually, interestingly, its become a very…it’s become a thing which, you know, the high tech architects as they used to be called, seem very technocratic, have actually seamlessly moved into this field of building with waste, building with local materials and see that as being actually a very high tech thing to do.
Matthew Sweet: And is that true of designers broadly as well would you say Antonia, because I mean do they really want to work with stuff out of people’s dustbins? Aren’t they rather attached to PVC, a material which famously must go to the grave of landfill and can’t be recycled?
Antonia Ward: They shouldn’t have to work out of people’s dustbins. I mean the idea of recycling that we know is down-cycling, it’s making worse quality products out of second hand materials. If you build things so that they can be remade and remanufactured you’re up-cycling, you’re making a new and better thing out of an old material.
Matthew Sweet: But might there not be some resistance to the idea of using material that’s already been used somewhere else?
Antonia Ward: I don’t think there’s…there’s a whole generation of designers out there who do not want to make better looking landfill and they’re desperate for ideas to make better, more glorious, more beautiful, more useful products for people. That’s what designers do.
Matthew Sweet: And how do you see that manifesting itself, what can you detect that’s going on now, some innovation that you think may shape design in years to come?
Antonia Ward: I think one of the biggest innovations we’re seeing is people who are happy to live with less for longer, people who are creating products. There’s a small clothing company in Wales called Howies who say when you buy one of their jackets think about who you’re going to pass it on to cause its going to last for twenty years.
Matthew Sweet: Hugh, anything like that that you can see on the horizon?
Hugh Pearman: There’s quite a lot of things happening in the field of building where actually where something is made of waste is actually quite a chic thing, quite a chic object to have and it has that gloss and that veneer, as it were, on it and that’s worked very well so far.
Matthew Sweet: Thanks very much indeed Hugh Pearman and Antonia Ward.