“Our traditional thinking is cradle-to-grave—the way many of our current industries still operate. It’s a design paradigm that destroys the planet. With Cradle-to-Cradle thinking, products should be made with quality and beauty. We need to focus on a positive agenda. What is the positive footprint of a product or a service? Look at nature - it’s not just about reducing, avoiding, minimizing - it’s about abundance using the right materials. Nature doesn’t know waste as everything is reused. It is all about reusing and recycling nutrients. This is true both for biological cycles and industrial cycles.” - Dr. Michael Braungart
More conventional views take the stand that sustainability is about reducing environmental impact, using fewer resources, emitting fewer GHG emissions, etc. But is that really the right metric for defining a successful sustainability effort? Braungart would no doubt argue that it isn’t. Why? Because by thinking about polluting less, or being less “bad”, or reducing the degree of damage to the environment or society, the problem is that less damage is still damage. Instead, organizations need to look at the entire product lifecycle and ask, “How can products be designed in such a way as to maximize the environmental, societal, and financial benefits - rather than simply minimize negative impacts?” There’s a big difference.
Currently, companies are primarily focused on such sustainability metrics as: energy efficiency, minimizing carbon and water footprint, and reducing GHG emissions. Instead, what if companies were rated on their ability to design products that were durable, yet easily recycled once no longer in use? Not just made with safety in mind, but with environmentally-beneficial features in mind? What if sustainability was based on the ability to achieve some kind of positive environmental impact – and to achieve the equivalent of some kind of top-line environmental improvement - rather than simply a bottom-line resource reduction/savings?
It’s all part of next-generation product design, a topic that is explored in greater detail in the related research study, “Sustainability and the Product Lifecycle: A Report on the Opportunities, Challenges and Best Practices for Sustainable Product Design and Manufacturing.” So, stay tuned. We’ll be providing updates and an opportunity to participate in the research in the weeks and months ahead.
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