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ShareYes, we’ve been dragging our asses and blue boxes to the curb, but a new eco movement aims to rid us of rubbish – permanently.
Waste not: the next Industrial Revolution
It’s
garbage day. The reckoning. What will you drag to the curb? Your Will
& Grace box set? Broken baby toys? Leftover packaging from last
night’s microwave dinner? It all leaves a sloppy archaeological trail,
one that should nicely signal to future generations just how we choked
– and what vinyl couch finally blocked the collective trachea.
But
hold up. Forward-thinking minds are saying we might just be able to
have our trash and eat it, too. That’s right, kids, a zero-waste world
may be closer than you think. Especially if we can turn our discarded
office chairs and Britney CDs into fuel for nothing short of the next
industrial revolution.
***
Maybe,
just maybe, we’ve been looking at the concept of garbage all wrong.
Rather than seeing it as a negative, something we want to hide in dark,
airless pits, we should emulate nature’s design and embrace our waste,
say the minds behind Cradle To Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things
and MBDC, the innovative company set up by Cradle To Cradle’s authors,
William McDonough and Michael Braungart, back in 95 to help promote and
shape what they call the “next Industrial Revolution.”
If
you pry open the mechanics of that revolution, Steve Bolton, manager of
business development for MBDC says, “everything is nutrition for
something else. Waste should be beneficial and abundant; it should feed
other processes.”
Back up, did he say
waste should be abundant? It’s a startling statement to all of us born
in the shadow of that first Industrial Revolution – you know, the one
where nature’s been continually pillaged and tossed aside like
yesterday’s Pop Tart wrapper.
The way the
Cradle To Cradle folks see it, the only emissions coming out of
products like cars and the factories that make them should be water and
oxygen. And the actual products themselves? Well, under their system,
all materials, including the fabric of that chair you’re parked on,
would either cleanly return to the earth as organic nutrients or be
harm-free “technical nutrients” that can be recycled in perpetuity or
upcycled. Meaning those manufactured goods would have to be endlessly
reusable, not the one- or two-use wonders of today’s plastics.
So
a sturdy plastic computer case could be continually upcycled into a
sturdy plastic computer case, not downcycled into a dead-end park
bench. And that casing wouldn’t shed toxic dust in our homes the way
they do today.
The whole thing seems to
beg the involvement of government to boost producer
responsibility to new heights (see page 22), though Bolton insists,
“Ideally we wouldn’t need those regulations.”
Yes,
regs help push foot-draggers and bottom-feeders to do the right thing,
he concedes, but in the Cradle to Cradle world, regulation is a signal
of design failure, a licence to dispense harm at an acceptable rate.
MBDC
demands more from its corporate clients (everyone from Nike to Herman
Miller). And they’ve put their vision into practice with nearly 200
products, including office chairs (see page 28), wall coverings, pipes,
compostable diapers, even surf wax, they’ve fostered through their
Cradle To Cradle certification system. The end products aren’t
necessarily perfect (no item has received platinum certification, for
instance, and not all have upcycling infrastructure in place), but the
system is trying to keep the trajectory moving ahead.
A
few manufacturers are even leading the cradlers’ call for a brand new
checkout line framework. Instead of buying a computer, a car, a fridge
outright, we’d borrow them from companies through eco-leases.
That means the responsibility to dispose of that fridge or
computer at the end of its life would finally shift away from the
consumer and fall firmly into industry hands.
MBDC-certified
carpeting companies like Shaw are perfect examples of this. Lease its
EcoWorx carpet tiles and the company will replace them for you whenever
a high-traffic square wears out. Shaw then uses them as fuel for the
next generation of its carpets.
Some of
the best post-waste concepts will be trickling into Toronto’s local
industrial scene this fall. At the soon-to-be-christened Pearson
Eco-Industrial Park (North America’s largest eco business zone,
covering 12,000 hectares and 12,500 businesses), Toronto Region
Conservation Authority will be setting up an eagerly anticipated waste
exchange, among other green projects. That means a company that only
needs orange peels is teamed with another company that can use the
pulp. TRCA’s Chris Ricketts says the waste stream from one business
alone could easily heat and cool 14 million square feet of other
businesses nearby.
But you don’t have to
drive to Pearson to get the feeling that the end of garbage is nigh.
Walk into a Canadian Tire or Home Depot and you’ll get a glimpse of a
company that considers landfill “just really poorly managed
warehouses.” TerraCycle, the New Jersey company that brought worm poop
fertilizer to Canada in packaging made of refilled pop bottles
collected by schoolkids, is actually in the midst of setting up North
American’s largest upcycling infrastructure.
Its
CEO, Toronto native Tom Szaky, recently signed a mega-deal with Kraft
to take on all the millions of unwanted and unrecyclable drink pouches
the food giant churns out, and presto, TerraCycle sews them into pencil
cases, umbrellas and binders without melting them down the way
energy-intensive recycling would.
You
could peg the project as dead-end downcycling if TerraCycle weren’t
also telling consumer brigades to collect and return to the company
every single one of the new products it makes (for cash) to be born
again. It’s already got 10,000 collection locations across the country,
growing at 150 a week, with a new product being launched roughly every
four days.
Szaky says TerraCycle’s now in
negotiations with the top 25 consumer product goods companies, from
General Mills to Frito-Lay, to set up similar upcycling programs with
their waste streams.
Says Szaky, “Within
the next two or three years, this will be a massive infrastructure. It
may not rival recycling for a while, but it’s on its path.”
He
admits it’s not a perfect system. Sure, a couple of companies have
changed their design a little to help accommodate the upcycling
process, but some would argue that that production model does nothing
to get industry to reduce the amount of packaging it puts out to begin
with.
Still, its waste-swallowingways help
make TerraCycle a good example of the cradler concept that growth, done
right, can be green. Growth can be fun. And consumers don’t have to
stop what they do best: consuming.
The
idea might irk strident enviros, but until capitalism and all its
benchmarks are swept away by a great sea of melting polar ice, learning
to eat our waste might be the best road map to sustainability we’ve got.
NOW | August 12-19, 2008 | VOL 27 NO 50
- Cover Story
- Born again trash
- Alt.Health
- Tonic of joy
- Astrology
- Freewill Astrology
- Beauty Tip
- Upurea.com
- Savage Love
- Store of the Week
- Heart on Your Sleeve
- Take 5
- Haute cycling
- Technology
- Beyond phone sex
- TechToys
- LG Rumour
- Travel
- Walking the planks
- We want ...
- Goodfoot eco sneakers
- Notes & Deals
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