What is cradle-to-cradle recycling?
Recycling today, as proposed by most, is based on the premises that: 1) most industrial activity and the by-products created are harmful to the environment; and 2) the only way to minimize the damage is to practice “reduce, reuse, recycle” or “doing more with less.” In their 2002 seminal book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough and Michael Braungart challenged the way we think about industrial production and recycling. They contend that recycling, as it is practiced today, is actually “downcycling.” We try to reduce, reuse, recycle things to reduce their impact on the environment but the products we create from original products are either inferior in quality (because of materials degradation) or use only a fraction of the original material (with the rest thrown away as toxic waste). Cradle to cradle recycling is a sustainable concept that’s actually based on nature. A tree produces a thousand flowers in one season, but only one of those flowers would p
