Cradle to Cradle Design

creating healthy emissions — a strategy for eco-effective product and system design

EAP4 Shou-Hui Wang

Vocabulary• efficient — working or operating quickly and properly in an

organised way

• effective — successful or achieving the results that you want

• industry — the companies and activities involved in the process of producing goods for sale, especially in a factory or special area.

• sustainability — causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time

• decompose — become gradually damaged (into small pieces or elements) or worse in quality

What is ‘Cradle to Cradle’ Design?

• A study of design in order to make every product be designed with this further use!

• design a native of nature!

• from eco-efficiency to eco-effectiveness

From Cradle to Grave: original industrial model

• more than 90% of materials extracted to make durable goods become waste immediately — only 5%

• one-way, linear flow of materials through industrial systems

Eco-efficiency?

• Eco-efficiency is calculated by dividing the ‘value’ of a product by its ‘environmental impact’

• The Wuppertal Institute define it as a strategy to reduce the use of materials in the economy in order to reduce undesirable environmental impacts

• It begins with that industry is 100% bad

‘Less Bad’ is No Good

• ‘Small is Beautiful’?

• ‘Downcycle’ — the inevitable problem of recycle

• Most of products are never designed with this further use

So, what is eco-effectiveness?

• These are examples:

• 1. buildings produce more energy than they consume

• 2. factories that produce effluents that are drinking water

• 3. when an useful life of products is over, they can entirely decompose and back to nature, or return to industrial cycles to supply high quality raw materials for new products

Photographed by Ira Goldstein, CC-BY-SA 2010

Photographed by Pontafon, CC-BY-SA 2009

5 steps process

Step 1: Free of known culprits

Step 2: Personal preferences

Step 3: The passive positive list

Step 4: The active positive list

Step 5: Reinvention

Question1. Do you believe that people have to sacrifice their

life quality, such as economy and delights, to make a sustainable life?

2. Do you support that companies provide ‘a terminable service of product’ instead of ‘a product’ to customer is a remedy of waste issue?

3. Do you have any idea of something around our daily life can be innovated by ‘cradle-to-cradle’ method?