Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

In Cradle to Cradle, authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart challenge the extreme wastefulness of human industry and contemporary design, and look to nature for solutions. The authors, an architect and a chemist, argue that products should be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new -- either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (redesigning everything from carpeting to corporate campuses), the authors make an exciting and viable case for change. This handbook for 21st-century innovation should be required reading for business hotshots and environmental activists.