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Over the past several years
our description of environmental regulations as “a signal of
design failure” has often been taken as an outright rejection
of regulations of any kind. This interpretation couldn’t be
further from the truth. We need regulations to protect our air,
water and soil precisely because design failures are so prevalent.
But regulations are not the answer to our environmental woes. Traditional
regulations are aimed at limiting environmental destruction, and
if a system is highly destructive regulations will never be able
to compensate for poor design. Regulated efficiency gains in West
Germany through the 1980s, for example, left its ecological health
in no better shape than East Germany’s, where there were no
regulations at all. So when regulations are relied on as the exclusive
means of protecting the environment they can become part of the
problem, a way of diluting pollution without examining the design
flaws at its source.
There is an alternative. When we see a heavily regulated industry,
rather than condemning either the industry or the regulations, we
see an opportunity for re-design, a chance to make energy and manufacturing
systems so inherently healthful, productive and socially beneficial
that regulations become unnecessary. This shift from mere compliance
to creative innovation is a key to competitive advantage in the
global marketplace.
Regulations in a Time of Change
The transition, however, is just under way. We have only begun remaking
the way we make things. While new designs are yielding products
and processes that create habitat or purify water or safely generate
renewable energy, strong signals of design failure persist and regulations
still have a role. When women’s breast milk is regularly contaminated
with persistent organic pollutants, the chemical companies that
produce them need to be regulated until they have redesigned the
products and processes that cause harm. This is especially urgent:
Over the past 19 years, frequent testing in the countries of the
European Union has not revealed a single case in which a woman’s
breast milk would be allowed as drinking milk.
Regulations, then, are a legitimate transitional response. And when
technologies such as nuclear energy and genetic engineering threaten
to generate irreversible environmental changes, perhaps more urgent
action is called for. Addressing the possible impacts of these industries
would be an expression of democracy, for irreversible ecological
change robs future generations of the right to choose: Once you’ve
altered the genetic code there’s no turning back; once a species
is lost, it is lost forever. As Thomas Jefferson said, “life
is for the living,” and diminishing the life and the choices
of our children and grandchildren is a kind of remote tyranny. Regulations
that preserve choice and environmental health preserve democracy.
How do we create an effective regulatory framework for this transitional
moment? How do we know when to regulate and when to give commerce
free rein? Unfortunately, the conventional regulatory apparatus
doesn’t provide much clarity. Yet some basic, principled guidelines
can make regulations a more effective protector of the public realm
while also allowing the marketplace, and even regulation itself,
to stimulate the innovation and creativity needed to redesign human
industry.
Regulations and the Commons
First, it’s important to understand that commerce—in fact,
all human activity—occurs in a shared ecological context: the
commons. The commons includes the air we breathe, the water we drink,
the sunlight and soil that provide our nutrition. These are our
shared birthright, our inheritance and our legacy. These are the
things we keep healthy for everyone’s benefit—for this
generation and all generations hence. That’s why our design
standards are so high; we believe the things we make should generate
health and well-being for all the children, of all species, for
all time. And that’s why we say: Don’t mess with the commons.
There is also a commercial commons—the realm of markets, trade
and material flows—that is embedded in and dependent on the
biological commons. While the biological commons is governed by
the laws of nature, the commercial commons is governed by the laws
of the state and by business ethics.
That’s where regulations come in. It is the government’s
job to protect the shared benefits of the biological commons for
all to enjoy. Ideally, regulations create a social framework in
which commerce can operate responsibly and freely. If a company’s
commercial activities are beneficial to the public realm, it has
voluntarily accepted its responsibility to the commons and reaps
the benefits of being a fast, agile, productive player in the marketplace.
If a company puts a burden on the public sphere, if it destroys
the water, pollutes the air or degrades the land, it is the government’s
responsibility to step in and regulate its activities. The smart
company pursues the carrot; the conventional company bears the brunt
of the stick.
Setting the Bar too Low
What’s been missing in the regulatory framework is a carrot
big enough to be a stick. Regulations typically don’t drive
innovation and often the stick alone is not enough to protect the
environment. Consider water quality. Sediments and microorganisms
not covered by the Clean Water Act continue to pollute 44 percent
of U.S. waters. And when polluting substances are regulated, that
doesn’t always lead to the remediation of environmental harm,
a problem illustrated by the 20-year battle between the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and General Electric over the clean-up of
PCBs in the Hudson River. If, under current conditions, protecting
environmental health has proven so difficult, how will regulations
deal with a projected five-fold increase in economic activity over
the next 50 years?
Even when companies voluntarily comply with regulations, such as
the EPA’s annual Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), industry can
still harm people and the environment. Established in 1986, the
TRI gathers data from industrial facilities, which are required
to report on the release of hazardous chemicals, as well as the
location and quantities of stored chemicals. The reporting is designed
to notify nearby communities of possible public health problems.
While the most recent TRI data shows that chemical releases have
decreased roughly 48 percent since 1988, industrial facilities in
2000 released 7.1 billion pounds of toxic substances, including
persistent bio-accumulative chemicals, such as dioxins, mercury
and PCBs. A separate EPA report, released just weeks after the 2002
TRI, declared that 20 million Americans live in areas where elevated
levels of toxic chemicals pose a cancer risk 100 times greater than
the levels at which EPA pollution reduction programs typically target
cancer-risk sources.
As evidence mounts that even tiny amounts of dangerous emissions
can have harmful effects on biological systems over time, it seems
prudent, if not urgent, to add some new options to the repertoires
of both business leaders and the guardians of the public realm—and
even build cooperative relationships between them.
A New Paradigm for Re-design
The first step might be a commitment to environmental protection
that begins not with aiming to simply reduce the release of dangerous
chemicals, but attempting to eliminate waste and toxic emissions
altogether and restoring the health of the air, water and soil—by
design. Traditional manufacturing creates such a bevy of negative
consequences, and thus needs to be regulated, because it is built
on a cradle-to-grave model that generates products designed for
a one-way trip to the landfill and incinerator. The World Resources
Institute estimates that “one-half to three-quarters of annual
resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment
as wastes within one year.” Attempts to limit manufacturing
waste tend to dilute pollution and slow the loss of natural resources
without changing the design paradigm. The result: business strategies
and a regulatory environment built on restricting industry and curtailing
growth—a dispiriting commercial and environmental dead-end.
But what if our designs were so ecologically intelligent and generated
so much social and environmental value, we could actually celebrate
the things we make? The strategy we call Cradle-to-Cradle Design
allows us to do so. Modeled on the perpetual flows of energy and
nutrients that make the biological commons so wonderfully generative,
Cradle-to-Cradle Design applies the intelligence of natural systems
to product, process and facility design.
From an industrial design perspective, this means creating products,
supply chains and manufacturing processes that support life by replacing
industry’s cradle-to-grave model with systems modeled on nature’s
cradle-to-cradle cycles, in which one organism’s waste becomes
food for another and every material is a nutrient. When designers
and engineers apply these principles to product conception and material
flows management, they can begin to create goods that flow effectively
within closed loop systems, providing after each useful life either
nourishment for nature or high quality materials for new industrial
products. This strategy grows and celebrates the biological and
commercial commons rather than depleting them. Ultimately, we think
Cradle-to-Cradle Design can lay the foundation for an industrial
system that restores the natural world, eliminates the concept of
waste, and creates enduring wealth and social value.
In other words, we are offering a complement—and ultimately
an alternative—to environmental regulation. This is not pie
in the sky dreaming. While some corporations still see regulations
as obstacles to profitability and spend undue energy looking for
loopholes to protect the bottom line, others are making environmental
responsibility an integral part of their business agenda—and
benefiting from doing so.
Shaw Industries, for example, the largest producer of commercial
carpet in the world, has adopted the cradle-to-cradle design paradigm
as its core business strategy. The company is not only producing
safe, healthful, perpetually recyclable carpet tile, but will soon
be doing so with manufacturing plants powered by solar energy. Why?
Because it makes good business sense: it produces a product that
is more profitable. This required a massive investment in change
rather than in the perpetuation of conventional industry practices.
A New Path for Government and Industry
This is clearly an example of the carrot being far more compelling
than the stick—an idea not lost on the EPA. In March 2003,
the EPA Office of Solid Waste, in partnership with McDonough Braungart
Design Chemistry, announced the launch of the Cradle to Cradle Design
Challenge for E-Commerce Shipping Packaging and Logistics. The purpose
of the challenge is to generate creativity and innovation in the
industry with an invitation to rethink and redesign e-commerce packaging
for a cradle-to-cradle life cycle. Designs will consider packaging
and its complementary life cycle, including the systems needed to
facilitate cyclical material flows; the ecological and human health
characteristics of the materials; and how physical design facilitates
reuse and recyclability.
The industry, meanwhile, is considering forming an ongoing working
group dedicated to cradle-to-cradle packaging. At a July workshop
co-hosted by MBDC and the Darden School of Business, and conducted
by the Green Blue Institute, participants from companies such as
Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Hewlett-Packard, Pepsi and Starbucks,
along with EPA, met to discuss cradle-to-cradle principles and the
business case for developing cyclical material flows.
Clearly, the design challenge and EPA’s outreach to industry
represent a novel approach to addressing the problem of e-commerce
packaging waste, which has become an increasingly large portion
of the waste stream. Rather than regulating the industry, EPA is
challenging it to do better voluntarily. In effect, the industry
is being given the opportunity to win the right not to be regulated.
EPA is not telling the industry how to innovate. It is not diminishing
its speed, mobility or creativity. It is instead playing its role
as steward of the commons by becoming a driver of quality and innovation.
Wouldn’t it be marvelous if the EPA could create a new relationship
with commerce that encouraged new designs to emerge and evolve throughout
American industry? Imagine the EPA offering incredibly sweet carrots
to industries hungry for new ideas. Imagine the agency supporting
innovative, ecologically intelligent designs. Or developing cradle-to-cradle
benchmarks for materials, products and facilities and presenting
them to industry as practical, productive strategies that effectively
protect the commons.
As EPA policy analyst Angie Leith said, “Regulations play an
important role in our mission, but if we are going to take the next
step in environmental protection we are going to have to work on
a voluntary basis with industry to get there.”
Admittedly, EPA’s pro-active projects in Green Chemistry, Design
for the Environment and Product Stewardship are small efforts in
the grand scheme of things, but they show that the agency has made
a commitment to a new approach and has something it can grow.
“Looking into the future,” said Leith, “we see we
have to look upstream. We have to look at material flows management
not waste management. We have to think of cradle-to-cradle rather
than cradle-to-grave. That’s the direction we want to go.”
When sufficient energy develops within the EPA to vigorously pursue
this new path, benchmarks are out there to be studied and presented
to industry. Ford Motor Co., for example, has employed a living
roof and constructed wetlands and swales to manage stormwater runoff
at its restored Rouge River manufacturing site. Replacing an expensive
water treatment plant, the system allows water to flow and filter
in natural cycles, exceeding standards set by regulation with first
cost savings of $35 million. One among many examples, it shows how
ecologically intelligent design can meet the expectations of both
the guardian of the commons and the business executive.
Innovation and Competitive Advantage
The EPA and other government agencies could encourage designs such
as these, supporting industry with information and know-how, allowing
the U.S. to become a supportive home for intelligent design and
resource recovery. The result: A healthy environment, a growing
economy and a better quality of life for its citizens—and for
the rest of the world.
This is not just a nice idea; it’s a crucial step for the survival
of American industry. In recent years, as trade has rendered the
boundaries between nations more fluid, American manufacturing has
undergone a transformation. Corporations bent on achieving global
reach have increasingly moved manufacturing operations overseas
to nations that provide cheap labor and a less strict regulatory
environment. This has proved to be a double-edged sword. While many
businesses see their bottom line growing, they are increasingly
reliant on factories and supply chains they do not own or manage.
Consequently, few products are completely produced in the U.S and
few American companies know what’s in their products—consumers
and regulators don’t know either. The international recycling
of computers is just one example of how toxic products are made
offshore, used by U.S. consumers and then shipped back overseas,
creating a toxic flow of liabilities.
We need to reinvent our global business strategy. We need to re-design
our manufacturing model so we can offer the world a system built
on product quality, on design protocols founded on a thorough understanding
of the chemistry, the value and the beneficial effects of industrial
materials. If we begin now to develop our commercial industries
around cradle-to-cradle protocols, the U.S. can become the world
leader in high-quality product design rather than competing on uneven
and unhealthy terms within the old industrial system. This would
not only protect the health of the American economy, it would also
strengthen the world economy, yielding exceedingly smart, effective
benchmarks to export to developing nations, rather than exporting
harm. And as we renew product quality, we will also be developing
an intellectual infrastructure supporting the making of things that
will give us long-term prosperity rather than short term gain.
What an interesting irony that the protection of the commons, long
considered the bane of business productivity, could drive this bold,
environmentally sound vision for American economic strength and
the economic vitality of all nations.
William A. McDonough, FAIA, and Michael Braungart are founders of
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a consultancy that works with
a wide variety of companies to implement eco-effective design and
commerce strategies. For more information, visit www.mbdc.com. |
