The authors chose to make a recyclable, "treeless" book from from plastic resins and inorganic fillers. Its "synthetic paper" pages felt so resilient and smooth and sleek.
What the text lacks in eloquence, however, it makes up for in tactility. Its ideas merit five stars, but the text sags a bit and tends to repeat itself a lot, thereby losing some power. Three stars doesn't quite do justice to this book. Drawing on their experience in (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, McDonough and Braungart make an exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practice, and show how anyone involved with making anything can begin to do as well. Or they can be "technical nutrients" that will continually circulate as pure and valuable materials within closed-loop industrial cycles, rather than being "recycled" - really, downcycled - into low-grade materials and uses. They can be conceived as "biological nutrients" that will easily reenter the water or soil without depositing synthetic materials and toxins. Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we consider its abundance not wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective.
But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, such an approach only perpetuates the one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution, that creates such fantastic amounts of waste and pollution in the first place. "Reduce, reuse, recycle," urge environmentalists in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage.
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