15 March 2006
A building like a tree, a city like a forest
Posted by tony under: Books; Design; Environment .
Imagine a textile factory where the water comes out purer than when it went in, imagine an auto plant roofed with meadow grasses that is the home of nesting wild birds, imagine a home that produces more energy than it uses where the very concept of waste is unknown. Bill McDonough is the design genius behind these.
Bill is an architect who approaches sustainable design from a very different angle. Instead of looking at how we reduce waste, why don’t we find a way to destroy the concept of waste. Instead of classic recycling, which merely turns a high-end product into a low-end product and delays the journey to the landfill, why don’t we design our products for infinite usage so that they never see the inside of a dump?
By thinking of products as containing either biological or technical nutrients, Bill looks at how, by replacing current toxins and heavy metals that retard our ability to reuse resources and are often carcinogenic to boot, we can create products that, upon reaching their end of their lifecycle, can be returned to the factory and broken down again into materials that will create the next generation of product with no diminishment of quality.
One key example is a carpet that you lease instead of buy. The rubber mat is a biological nutrient that you could potentially throw out in your garden and instead of polluting the land would nourish it as it degraded, the top fibres are a technological nutrient that when returned to the factory can be broken down and used as raw material for a new carpet of similar quality. This design process works for the company as the reduced scarcity of materials makes for a lower cost base and works for the consumer who is no longer bringing carcinogenic toxins into their homes.
I love the way Bill attacks this problem because it fits perfectly with big business. He shows that ecologically intelligent design should not constrain but free companies. Bill’s world is one of no regulation (who needs regulation when you’re not producing any pollution) and plentiful resources.
Fittingly, after showing a distaste for taking something that accrues solar energy, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distils water, creates microclimates, produces complex sugars and self-replicates, and knocking it down and writing on it, his book Cradle to Cradle
One Comment so far...
Rodger Estrada Says:
12 November 2008 at 9:59 pm.
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