Reading Reflection 03

I found the book Cradle to Cradle very thought-provoking. These days, the major phrase is “reduce, reuse and recycle.” I thought it was interesting how the authors disagreed with this statement. William McDonough and Michael Braugnart believe that the best way for a product to be designed is that at the end of its life, it can be reused to make something of equal or better quality.
This is the concept of “upcycling,” which is a term that I have never heard before. I thought this was an interesting concept because with recycling, eventually a product will be thrown away after one or two lives, but this is not the case with upcycling. An average television is composed of 4,360 chemicals. Some of these chemicals are able to be reused and are valuable, while others are toxic. Isolating the valuable elements from the toxic ones would allow them to be upcycled and create a system of quality materials (110).
I also thought it was very interesting how they viewed the Industrial Revolution. So far in my classes, the Industrial Revolution has been portrayed as a mostly positive event. In my industrial engineering classes, the Industrial Revolution was the key event to all of the processes I am studying. In this book though, the Industrial Revolution is viewed as a system that “put billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil ever (18) ” along with creating regulations to prevent people from being poisoned. When you think about it this way, the Industrial Revolution sounds like an extremely negative event in the development of the modern world.
I often think about the damage that humans have done to the world in the past 60 years and it is shocking. Personally, I find it scary because if changes are not made to the way that we design products and systems, the world will be drastically different in 60 more years.
I also like how the concept of biomimicry was also discussed in this book. In the example of the cherry tree (72), the fallen blossoms can be considered waste, but instead people see them as beautiful. These blossoms are then decomposed and provide nourishment to many organisms. The authors mention the idea of designing our systems and products this way, where the “waste” is beautiful and in touch with nature.
While reading the book, I was shocked by the multiple references to the danger in the products that we use everyday. One example is the natural indigo dye, commonly used to die jeans, contains mutagens that deplete genetic diversity (42). Other examples of dangerous materials are plastic water bottles and polyester shirts (38). These dangers just make me wonder if humans are becoming too scientific and if we are really just screwing ourselves over by constantly developing new materials and methods to improve existing products.
One section of this book that I found interesting was Chapter 5: Respect Diversity. I feel that when trying to create the optimal design for a product or system, the “bad models” would be eliminated, while eliminating diversity. I thought it was interesting how there are over 8 thousand species of ants in the world. Even though an ant appears like a simple system, 8 thousand different types are needed in order for it to survive in different places and by doing different tasks (120).
Overall, I thought this book made me think about some of the products that I use everyday and how they could be designed better to have a positive impact on the environment and user. I did feel like the book was pretty repetitive though and I got bored at some parts. Even though I thought the plastic pages were cool, I found the book heavy and hard to hold open.