During this speech on Wednesday, Bill McDonough presented a new idea for living in a world of consumption surrounded by “stuff”. Why should we limit ourselves in our production? Self-denial and restraint may not be the answers to living an environmentally conscious life. Instead, McDonough advocated celebrating life and the nice things that surround us, but perhaps adopting a new design plan. The goal is not to be “less bad” but to truly be “good” by creating products that are not discarded as waste but create food for the future.
Waste = Food
If the products that are produced do not contain toxins and can fluidly be recycled back into the system with nothing being lost, we are creating food for future life. For example Cradle-to-Cradle certified carpet can be recycled back into carpet without an ounce being wasted. The backing is not toxic, and the yarn contains no synthetics. After the carpet is no longer needed, everything is removed, separated and make into new carpet.
Other things that cannot be remade into other things, should be able to break down completely to create food for plants and animals. Books, cloth, leather, and wood can be completely clean inputs for a composting, if they are treated without environmentally harmful chemicals.
Lets take an example from nature. We do not get angry at a tree for producing too many blossoms in the spring (have you looked outside recently?!) because even though the blossoms do not all produce fruit in the end, they recycle neatly back into nature. This is not efficient but it is nature’s design principle. Yet plastic accumulated in the Pacific gyre outnumbers zooplankton 6:1. This is not overproduction we can celebrate. Even more than that, we cannot afford to waste plastics, which are made from non-renewable fossil fuels. As fossil fuels become more expensive we need to rely on the fossil fuels we have transformed into plastic to be the raw material for future production.
What if we took this example and applied it to buildings? One of the buildings designed by McDonough + Partners produces more energy than it uses and it contains its own water purification system. Sometimes overproduction can be a good thing.
