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Eco-warriors are skilled at highlighting the destructive effect of every modern-day industry on the environment. Technocrats, meanwhile, find conservation advocates to be insensitive to the social and economic roles of industrialization. They maintain that if every environmental protection advice is observed thoroughly, it will lower living standards everywhere, technologically and economically. Both groups perceive industrial waste and the machineries that we create, as destructive to the environment. It all comes down to a choice is between rampant industrialization and narrow environmentalism. Is there, perhaps, another way out of the box? As a matter of fact, there is a third alternative. Cradle to cradle recycling. Have you heard of the book called “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things" by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, published in 2002? In this seminal book, the authors assert that recycling, as it is practiced today, is in fact "downcycling" or "cradle to grave" recycling. We craft wall insulation from styrofoam or produce news print out of white paper. The new products we fashion out of old materials are actually lesser in quality to the original (due to materials degradation or contamination) or utilize very little of it (the remainder deposited in the dump sites as dangerous waste). Compare this with how nature disposes of her excess. When a tree creates a thousand flowers to reproduce or replicate itself, it is probable that only one of those flowers will actually result in a new tree. But, we don’t find the 999 other blooms wasted since all these are returned to the ground to become fertilizer to help begin the tree’s next reproduction cycle. In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Waste is synonymous to food, everything goes back to the earth as sustenance. This is known as sustainability, every leaf or seed or flower contributes to "sustain" the cycle and the process is repeated unendingly without any unusable excess. Cradle-to-cradle recycling is the inclusion of this very natural and wasteless approach to sustainability into our production technologies from the very beginning of the process - in the design or conceptualization of the finished product. Waste is a function of erroneous design. Architects, designers, and engineers will have to think of the post-consumer disposition of their products from the very start, how these gadgets (with ALL of their parts) can be reused or reintroduced into the production stream as “technical nutrients” or swiftly biodegraded and redeposited safely to the earth. None wasted, everything reusable or recyclable - that is the meaning of cradle-to-cradle recycling. A person who goes to the market considers using plastic bags or paper bags for her purchases. A town council in Europe considers if their town should keep burning coal or use palm oil for energy production. In our everyday lives, we invariably get trapped into "lesser of two evils" type of choices. Plastic lasts for thousands of years and coal is the most polluting of all the fuels we burn. On the other hand, paper production kills trees, and palm oil production kills orangutans. Lesser evils. Since the start of the industrial revolution, we've been boxed into this appearance of limited options. Cradle to cradle recycling, once it becomes the norm (and the opposition of ignorant interests is enormous) will probably be the "next industrial revolution." It dispels the illusion of limited options, because when sustainability is a basic consideration in the product design, we are not forced to make those ridiculous choices. Every gadget reaching the end of its life-cycle is either reusable, recyclable, or biodegradable. That is cradle-to-cradle recycling.
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Michael Arms writes for the Pacebutler Recycling and Environmental blog and maintains several Squidoo lenses on recycling and the environment. Pacebutler Corporation is one of several US based companies which buy used cell phones directly from US mobile phone users. You can also donate cell phones to your preferred non-profit through Pacebutler.
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