Andrew Sibley - Desso

The Greeks called it Helios, the Romans Sol and, despite forming over 98% of the solar system, it is technically a Yellow G2 Dwarf, one of over 100 billion other stars in the universe.

Every second it converts about 700 million tons of hydrogen into about 695 million tons of helium and five million tons of energy, generating 386 billion billion mega Watts.

It takes light from the Sun about eight minutes to reach Earth or 1.3 seconds for reflected light to bounce from the Moon, and without it we would be in a cold and dark place and, without photosynthesis, unable to grow food. We couldn’t exist.

The Sun’s generosity is a good place to start in looking at today’s environmental imperatives of climate change and resource depletion, because the Sun’s energy is the only resource that is replenished every day. Everything but the Sun’s energy is finite.

In every other respect, we live in an eco-system that is closed; what we take, make and waste, we waste forever – and that’s the fundamental challenge facing manufacturing industry. When its resources are gone, they’re gone for good, and so too our capacity to make new things.

It was that realisation that created the modern environmental movement, which in many ways can be dated from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. This was an unprecedented UN conference both in size and the scale of its concerns. The Conference Secretary-General, called it a “historic moment for humanity.”

The Summit’s message was that only a complete transformation in our attitudes and behaviour would bring about the changes necessary to safeguard the environment. It also coined the phrase “eco-efficiency.”

This, so it was believed, would transform industry from a system that takes, makes, and wastes into one that integrates economic, environmental and ethical concerns. Essentially, eco-efficiency means doing more with less.

Eco-efficiency has been the guiding principle ever since. For many companies, it has meant assessing manufacturing and distribution processes and then finding ways to minimise their impacts on the environment – for example, by reducing waste or energy consumption. Eco-efficiency has achieved enormous environmental benefits.

More than anything, it has brought the environment into sharp focus, bringing with it a shared sense of our impact on the world around us. In a few short years we have collectively recognised the challenges of resource depletion and climate change and, as individuals, families, companies and governments are doing something about it.

But eco-efficiency doesn’t have all the answers because, effectively, it’s about being “less bad” and believing it to be inherently ethical. The Earth’s resources, except solar energy, will still run out, although at a slower rate. Eco-efficiency buys us time, nothing more.

But a new environmental theory is gaining traction; a theory that suggests that, rather than make the wrong things less bad, we instead make products that are right. The name of this theory is Cradle to Cradle^®.

It was heralded in a book, ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things’ by the German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough. Published in 2002, its central premise is that products should be conceived from the very start with intelligent design and the intention that they would eventually be endlessly recycled in their entirety as nutrients.

The refinity process, which separates the yarn from the backing so that both can be reused.

Cradle to Cradle^® looks at the Earth’s resources as either biological nutrients that are useful for the biosphere, or technical nutrients that are fundamental to the technosphere, the systems that comprise industrial processes. It’s a theory that draws heavily from nature’s example; in nature, nothing is wasted: everything is reused in closed loops, over and over.

It’s a perspective that sees old products as nourishment: foodstuffs that can be disassembled and used to make new products, eliminating waste from the manufacturing cycle, because every old TV, carpet or washing machine – and everything else – will have been designed for disassembly and reuse.

Braungart and McDonough state that when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems – for example, the effectiveness of nutrient recycling, or the abundance of the Sun’s energy – they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.

It is no less than a manifesto for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design; a positive agenda that says that, if we learn from nature, the manufacturing sector can be truly good. Time Magazine has called it “a unified philosophy that – in demonstrable and practical ways – is changing the design of the world.”

The scale of the environmental challenge is particularly significant in the flooring industry. Statistics from the USA suggest that carpeting is replaced on average every seven years, despite usually having a guaranteed life of between ten and 25 years. That means that a lot of perfectly good carpeting is thrown away every year, because it’s faded or just feels dated.

According to a UK study carried out for the Contract Flooring Association, about 500,000 tonnes of carpet is thrown out in the UK every year. One estimate suggests that in the developed world some 2% of landfill waste is made up from old carpeting. Multiply those statistics across the world and you can sense the scale of those wasted resources, when much of that material could be used again.

In 2007, Desso entered into partnership with the Hamburg-based Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA – http://www.epea.com), the brainchild of Cradle to Cradle^® co-founder Michael Braungart. EPEA encourages companies to assess their activities on sustainability, recycling, waste management and energy use – and make improvements throughout.

We have worked with EPEA to first identify the “material health” of each component in our products; assess how each component can be recovered and recycled in a process of “material reutilisation”; assess energy and water usage and, lastly, examine our policies on social responsibility and fair labour practices. We intend that all our products will be designed and produced according to Cradle to Cradle^® design principles by 2020.

For example, we have introduced EcoBase^® – a carpet backing that can be entirely recycled back into carpet backing, and we are introducing Take Back™ programmes to ensure that products can be recycled according to Cradle to Cradle^® principles.

That in itself introduces a new concept alien to most manufacturing industries – the concept of a product of service. Instead of the current paradigm in which goods are bought, owned and disposed of, products containing valuable technical nutrients will be reconceived as new products that new consumers will wish to purchase.

In that manufacturing scenario, consumers would effectively buy the service of that product for a certain period and then, at the end of its useful life, the manufacturer would take it back, take it apart and reuse its nutrients to make new products. Yes, we would still be in the business of selling products but, unlike now, we would retain responsibility for those products – to the end of their useful lives and beyond.

From a manufacturing perspective, that doesn’t mean making products more durable or designed to last longer. It doesn’t mean asking consumers to make do with their mobile phones or TV sets for longer, because consumption is bad. Cradle to Cradle^® makes planned obsolescence good; it makes consumption good. It merely asks us, the consumer, to buy new products from companies committed to the most sustainable closed loop manufacturing methodologies.

There are obvious benefits for all of us. First, it makes good business sense because, without waste, companies save money from having to source valuable new resources and, second, with nutrients being constantly recycled, it diminishes the need to extract any more new materials. That really does change the design of the world.

The challenge for manufacturing industry is to find that elusive balance between people, profit and the planet – the Triple Bottom Line that is at the heart of the environmental agenda. But too often, using the eco-efficient model, we have ended up concentrating on profit, with social or ecological considerations coming second.

Cradle to Cradle^® allows us to use the Triple Bottom Line as a strategic design tool and perhaps, as Braungart and McDonough suggest, turn that matrix on its head and consider corporate strategy as being about a Triple Top Line – a new starting point from which to design products and processes.

The Sun provides us with that starting point, an energy source capable of providing all our energy requirements many times over. It simply requires us to look at our manufacturing processes in a different way: to make best use of the Sun’s abundance to make products circulating in endless closed loops.

It’s nothing less than industrial re-evolution but, as Albert Einstein said, if we are to solve the problems that plague us, our thinking must evolve beyond the level we were using when we created those problems in the first place.

Paul Gilding

I still buy the argument. However, if we’re honest we’d have to concede performance to date has actually been abysmal.

Sure, there are some impressive examples of individual companies doing things unimaginable a few decades ago. However, the reality from the point of view of the planet and its people is that the income gap is widening, climate change is upon us and getting worse, China and India are gobbling up the world’s coal (and will soon be emitting the consequences). Then when forecasts in global economic growth are combined with the forecast consequences of what is, in reality, largely business as usual, the situation starts to look very ugly, very quickly.

So is market driven sustainability, like Marxism, something that will in hindsight be a case of “oh well, it seemed like a good idea at the time”?

Despite its failure to date, I would still say no—it is a sound idea, we just haven’t applied it yet. And given the state of the world’s ecosystem, we’d better get moving. Because while it’s easy to mount a well argued case that markets don’t work for sustainability (because currently that is a fact), I still don’t hear a viable alternative to deliver lots of sustainability quickly and globally.

What do we need to do? For a start, we have to move beyond the blame game. Consumers, disguised as members of the public in opinion polls, blame corporations for plundering the earth. The precious minority of corporations who are producing the products we need to move us forward, blame the consumer for not buying them. However, it is too convenient to just lay blame.

By the way, don’t you love the way companies expect consumers to behave differently than the companies themselves ever would? As if companies are going to do the right thing environmentally without a reasonable financial return, yet they somehow expect customers en masse to pay more for products that don’t deliver any additional benefit beyond the feel-good factor!

So we need to fix markets and make them work for sustainability, by focusing less on prescribing outcomes, and more on the mechanisms to get us there. The obvious and much discussed one is to get in place a global carbon trading system, one designed around absolute CO2 reductions in the range of 60% by 2050.

New York State's Bottle Bill - Effective June 1, 2009

For example, with drink bottles we now have very strong data from around the world that gives clear evidence that deposit systems can double recovery rates. They also create jobs and finance infrastructure while shifting public attitudes. So let’s start by rolling that out globally. But why stop at drink bottles? Why not put a deposit on all containers and while we’re at it, on mobile phones, on computers and on cars. Our research strongly suggests that corporate opposition to such schemes is overwhelmingly ideological—a genetic fear of regulation—rather than a rational position based on what’s good for business. As the corporate sector pleads for environmentalists to abandon ideology in progress toward sustainability, so too must they.

Markets do work, but they work according to how they’re designed. They have not been designed to achieve sustainability and until we redesign them they won’t, despite the good intentions of many market players—companies and consumers. So let’s start by designing the market to have our materials flow back into the market rather than having them dumped into the environment.

Of course some very big corporate players would fight this, as the big drinks companies have been doing for many years—resisting what has clearly been proven as the most effective way to increase recovery and recycling rates: putting a deposit on drink bottles. But big entrenched players will always resist change. They either need to get on board with the new world and be part of the solution, or we’ll have to let a bit of creative destruction deal with them—something markets are definitely very good at.

Vetrazzo believes that a green product should do more than just use recycled materials or avoid release of dangerous airborne toxins — it should solve an environmental problem. Vetrazzo does just that by creating a new market for waste glass, including glass that cannot be recycled into other products. Each countertop panel is made from 550 pounds of crushed recycled glass from traffic lights, windshields, and beverage bottles. In 2007, Vetrazzo transformed over 250 tons of recycled glass — including 125 tons of waste glass not recyclable elsewhere — into beautiful, functional surface products.

“Sustainability is achieved when you no longer have to sacrifice aesthetics for the good of the people or the planet,” says James Sheppard, president of Vetrazzo. “People won’t do the right thing if the right thing isn’t gorgeous.”

The company’s revolutionary commitment to the triple bottom line — serving people, planet, and profit — is the larger story.

PEOPLE: At a time when manufacturing jobs are outsourced all over the world, Vetrazzo is keeping living wage jobs at home. They offer full health and dental benefits while paying 50 percent higher wages than many other West Coast manufacturing jobs. With its state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in a remodeled Ford auto plant, Vetrazzo focuses on local hiring in economically depressed Richmond, California. Workers enjoy natural light, safety equipment that goes well beyond what is mandatory, and a continuing education program. Vetrazzo believes this investment in their people produces highly motivated workers, greater retention, and a top-quality product.

PLANET: Vetrazzo’s most obvious commitment to the planet is the use of recycled glass that would otherwise go directly into landfills. Vetrazzo offers a “green alternative to natural stone” like granite and marble, which come with a steep environmental price tag.

“Quarried stone products are usually produced in developing countries that often don’t have adequate worker safety regulations and are quarried in a way that is very destructive to the environment,” says Sheppard. And burning the fossil fuel necessary to transport those heavy materials halfway around the globe releases greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming.

Even the company’s daily operations are designed with the planet in mind. Vetrazzo operates on a closed-loop water filtration system, saving approximately 150,000 gallons per month. The factory will be 100-percent solar powered by year’s end.

PROFIT: The socially responsible entrepreneurs of Vetrazzo wanted to do more than make a green countertop, they wanted it to be beautiful, durable, and distinctive. And they wanted the entire company to be sustainable with a focus well beyond economic profit. The community’s economic health and the planet’s environmental health are equally as important as the bottom line at Vetrazzo.