The first (and so far, only) Cradle-to-Cradle home, which we profiled yesterday, caused quite a green stir. Not only did it feature a plethora of green design features, it was architecturally adventurous and forward-looking. It was designed to be built outside Roanoke, Virginia, (in a suburb called Gainsboro) though, and in order for the home to better fit in with its new surroundings, when it came time to actually build the thing, the original design was passed up, in favor of a more suburban looking house. This split the green community down the middle: those who thought it was boring and “safe” to choose the suburban design, and those who thought it would serve the green community better to show that green can be mainstream as well. Here are both sides.

TreeHugger’s resident architect and green building expert, Lloyd Alter, had this to say: “In the recent Archetype competition, they just picked the boring [www.treehugger.com], because, well, it had great green credentials and they had to sell it to developers. At least they are building the winner.
“Far more obnoxious is the C2C competition [www.treehugger.com], where they gave the prize to a marvelous, modern and innovative project [www.treehugger.com] that ran on spinach, but when it came to building… as organizer [url= http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/the_th_intervie.php]Gregg Lewis[/url] says in Inhabitat: ‘Many of the designs, including many of the winners, were far more progressive in their thinking relative to the environmental sustainability than they were in addressing the question of economic viability. We are continuing to pursue development of a number of the winning designs elsewhere in the region where price won’t be quite as much of a constraint and will look forward to seeing a variety of the solutions in their built form.’ translated: Let’s build the cheap one that won’t scare the neighbours.

“If innovative, challenging designs lose to contextual front-porch jobs because jurors cannot judge both architecture and systems, then we will not get the best architects even bothering to enter these competitions. This is a great loss- we need ideas that change the way we look at buildings, not how we look at plumbing.”

The other side of the fence is articulated by here [www.treehugger.com] thanks to our pals at Grist. Because of several political and socio-economic reasons, a different design was chosen; “unlike the winning entry, which introduces a new model for living, the Rife and Feather design is a traditional, pitched-roof Southern home that has been reproduced nationwide for hundreds of years.”

“The result is a house that conjures images of mom and apple pie, backyard barbecues and front porch swings. There is nothing about this house that says ‘gray water treatment happens here’, and that’s exactly the point, according to Gregg Lewis, the C2C Home organizer. ‘We want to show that a green home doesn’t need to cost more or look different from its neighbors.’ What C2C Home organizers hope to achieve in Gainsboro is to associate sustainability with affordability and tradition.

“Right now, the hurdles are overcoming the misconceptions and the notion that things can’t be done in a different way and still be affordable,” says Matthew Coates, part of the original winning design team. “We’re showing that it is possible for the average person to create a more sustainable lifestyle.”

Hmm. So, who wins this debate: super-sustainable, adventurous, spendy design, or super-sustainable, traditional, mainstream design? Feel free to spend your two cents in the comment section below.

After reading about a few of the different kinds of products that can be considered “Cradle to Cradle,” you might be thinking to yourself, “It’s great that these products represent a new way of creating things, but, if I don’t buy them, what does it matter to me?” Good question. Aside from thinking it’s important to simply know that they’re out there, we’re also eager to point out that it’s not just an idea, and a list of products; C2C is being used for other impactful things as well. At the top of this list: a Cradle to Cradle home.

That’s right: an entire dwelling, where you spend 60% of your life, that doesn’t create any persistent waste. Here’s the idea: the home has become a machine for consuming in. In our homes, we process an increasing quantity of consumer goods – bringing them in one end and discarding them at the other. As we consign our planet’s finite material nutrients to landfills, we perpetuate the modern invention of “waste” which is unknown in nature.

The answer, then, seems simple enough: follow nature more closely, and we’ll create less and less waste, until eventually that quotient is zero. By pursuing a vision of industry that does not damage ecosystems or social systems, Cradle to Cradle design moves beyond the “less bad” aims of efficiency; instead, it proposes a new strategy called “eco-effectiveness.” By learning from nature’s “design principles,” eco-effective design conceives industrial systems that emulate the healthy abundance of nature.

The first such home (pictured below) follows these principles from top to bottom. It utilizes timeless passive solar strategies by shielding unwanted summer sun and absorbing heat from low winter sun through its thermal mass. Active solar collection provides the main source of necessary electrical energy. The core extends vertically, clad with a super-conductive photosynthetic plasma cell skin that is able to generate 200% more electrical voltage per area than contemporary photovoltaics. It saves water by using a vegetated roof system that collects and filters stormwater into the building core. The core collects and supplies all household plumbing elements contained within it. Black and grey water are released to a primary septic tank below the core and eventually released as effluent to the “living garden”. Rapidly renewable soy-foam wall panels offer superior thermal resistance with minimal embodied energy. Reconstituted concrete with striated polymer mesh reinforcement efficiently supports the open building plan, allowing a flexible arrangement of partitions and spaces to accommodate present and future users.

From the ground up, this home, designed to be built in Roanoke, Virginia, are a marvel of modern sustainable design. Follow its principles, and there’s no reason we should throw anything in the landfill again. Learn more about the amazing design at the C2C Home website [www.c2c-home.org].

“Cradle to Cradle” has gone from a cool-sounding, high-level idea to roadmap to a more sustainable world to practical design manual that is influencing the way that the stuff we use gets designed and built. It may sound a little bit like a pie-in-the-sky goal, an easy-to-say, difficult-to-implement practice, but it’s really happening. Here are some of TreeHugger’s favorite examples of Cradle to Cradle (or C2C, for brevity fans) products and ideas in motion.

1) Since the first six products [www.treehugger.com] were certified, including Steelcase’s Think chair (above) McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), the company that administers the certification, has added more than twenty new products to the list; both together and separately, they represent a “how-to” guide for the C2C concept.
2) C2C is not just for building materials and to-the-trade products, like concrete and task seating; as gDiapers has proven [www.treehugger.com], there’s room for everything — even diapers — in C2C, if it’s sustainable enough.
3) The concept has even reached some government agencies, as the US Postal Service [www.treehugger.com] is on board; they’re helping to prove that now, more than ever, C2C is going mainstream [www.treehugger.com].

4) But C2C is not just for products; it was a huge influence on TreeHugger’s Umbrella Inside Out [umbrella.treehugger.com] design competitions, where a cradle-to-cradle-like umbrella was designed, and a runway-ready couture dress was designed and created from discarded umbrellas.
5) All of this sounds neat, but for proper context, especially for the certification, it’s important to really break down what it means [www.treehugger.com], so we did.

6) Now that we’ve established what it is, what it means, and how it’s supposed to work, we had to test it out. TreeHugger Petz took the book for a “test-bath,” (pictured above) not only to show that the book actually is waterproof, but to showcase one of the ways that we can create better ways for the world to work.
7) Even companies like Herman Miller, who’ve been designing with the environment in mind for decades, have something to learn from C2C; if they can learn from it, so can we.

According to the Dictionary of Sustainable Management [www.sustainabilitydictionary.com], “Cradle to Cradle” is, “a phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s and popularized by William McDonough (pictured below) and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book of the same name. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle to cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constiuent components back into service.”

This is summarized more succinctly in McDonough & Braungart’s book as “waste = food” — we touched on it when discussing upcycling [www.sundancechannel.com]. Essentially, according to their model, everything we surround ourselves with — homes, cars, books, computers, coffee cups and so on — should have life beyond its original intended purpose; it shouldn’t go from its origins as raw materials and a design — the “cradle” — to the landfill, where it takes up space and doesn’t do anyone any good — the “grave.” Instead, everything we interact with should have multiple, or, more accurately, unending, cycles through the product stream, eschewing the wastebasket and landfill for more useful functions that we can all actually use.

This all starts with design, at the very beginning of a new products’ cycle. Again, to cite the book, the authors argue that “when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems — the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, 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.”

For example, the book itself is made from synthetic “paper,” made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, essentially making it upcycled plastic. Instead of paper, old plastic bottles are “recycled” and turned into two covers and bunch of pages, which are amazingly pliable and tactile, just like paper. In addition to being waterproof — yep, you can read it in the bath, no problem — and more rugged and durable than paper, the book can be effectively recycled by municipalities that accept polypropylene (that’s number 5 plastic), so it can go make more yogurt containers, or books. Not that we’d recommend ever getting rid of the book…but the point remains: it’s a new way of designing the world.

As it turns out, everything is subject to this new paradigm; this week, we’ll take a closer look at some of the incredible opportunities available to us when putting Cradle-to-Cradle at the top of our lists.

Technical Difficulties

Our second GREEN meeting in Second Life with Simran Sethi was held on Tuesday Night. The topic on the table that evening – “How can we green our own homes?”. The crowd was there and ready to go with questions for Simran and it was shaping up to be another informative meeting in Second Life and then…..the audio went out. Boo! It’s kind of difficult to hold a live Q&A when you can’t hear the audio….and so it goes when you’re dealing with such new and cutting edge platforms – right?

That said – we have to commend the attendees that night. Everyone was very patient and understanding of the situation and an insightful discussion on “cradle to cradle” design broke out between the avatars in the room. After numerous attempts to fix the audio problems – we had to throw in the towel. But we’ll be back next week, rested and ready to go. We were able to save some of your questions from Tuesday night and will address those at the next GREEN meeting, as well as questions on our new topic “Cities and Waste”.

For a slew of great photos, be sure to check out our SECOND LIFE PHOTO ALBUMS. [www.sundancechannel.com] Also, in order to give you a visual of how cool video can look on our virtual screen in Second Life, check out this photo of our screening room with a Simran Sethi webisode playing in the background.

Next GREEN Meeting in Second Life:

Date: May 1st
Time: 10pm EST / 7pm SLT (Second Life Time)
Topic: CITIES – How trashy are you? How can we reduce waste in our own cities?
Where: THE GREEN meeting will take place in the Main Screening Room on Sundance Channel Island.

See you there!

Watch Simran’s Webisode
Host of THE GREEN Online, Simran Sethi discusses McDonough’s revolutionary “Cradle to Cradle” design concept in this week’s webisode:

So as Simran asks, “Is this a fantasy or a useful way to re-think how we consume?” We’re interested in your answers and solutions. Join the discussion and give us your two cents and tell us about other design solutions that are changing the way we produce and how we consume.

Join the discussion [www.sundancechannel.com]

THE GREEN in Second Life

Be sure to join Simran in Second Life to discuss THE GREEN. This week Simran will be at our Sundance Channel Cafe in Second Life at the following time:

What: Join Simran Sethi, host of THE GREEN on Sundance Channel, in Second Life for weekly discussion forums on environmental issues and solutions.
Date: April 24th
Time: 10pm EST / 7pm SLT (Second Life Time)
This Week’s Topic: BUILD – How can we design better products for a better future?
Where: THE GREEN forum will take place in the Main Screening Room on Sundance Channel Island.

We got started [www.sundancechannel.com] on a discussion of green ideas for the workplace earlier this week by looking at some desks and workstations. Many of us spend much of our time at work sitting down, so today we’ll examine a few of our favorite chairs that are good for comfort, posture and the planet.

We can’t think “office chair” without picturing Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair [www.treehugger.com]. Perhaps the most recognizable (and imitated) of these contemporary designs, the chair combines distinctive looks with pioneering ergonomics and is the envy of office workers the world ’round. Aeron is based on the ideas that ergonomically, the chair should do more than just sit there; functionally, it should be as simple and natural as possible, and environmentally, it should be durable, repairable and designed for disassembly and recycling. Made largely of recycled materials, the Aeron chair is designed to last a long time, with parts that get the most wear easily replaced and recycled.

Unfortunately, Aeron isn’t in the budget for all of us; thankfully, there are a host of office chairs that offer similar ergonomics, design, use of recycled materials and recyclability. Haworth’s Zody chair [www.treehugger.com] and the Think chair from Steelcase [www.treehugger.com] both have serious eco-cred (they’re both [url= http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/10/the_first_six_c.php]Cradle-to-Cradle certified[/url]) and offer real comfort with a smaller price tag than Aeron. There’s more to green seating at work than these beauties, though. Along with Herman Miller, Haworth and Steelcase, companies like Humanscale (their award-winning Liberty side chair [www.treehugger.com] is pictured) and Krug offer guest, hospitality and conference seating options that will satisfy just about any office seating requirement while taking care to design with both human comfort and planetary well-being in mind.

Of course, where you sit and work are just the tip of the greening-the-office iceberg; from office supplies and printing to lighting and energy use, there are a bevy of quick and easy things you can do to reduce your office’s ecological footprint. We’ve put as many as we can think of in the How to Green Your Work [www.treehugger.com] guide, part of our “How to Go Green” series, that we recommend for further green-office reading and ideas. There are so many ways to do it today, the only hard part is choosing which one you’ll do first.

Recycling is a popular practice for us at TreeHugger, for obvious reasons: it prevents more junk from entering the waste stream, requires less new stuff to be manufactured, and, for the most part, is a green way to go. Even better than recycling, though, is a concept called “upcycling.” Coined by green gurus William McDonough and Michael Braungart in Cradle to Cradle [www.treehugger.com], their book on ecologically intelligent design, it’s the practice of taking something (often disposable or no longer of use) and transforming it into a product of greater value and use. So, it’s not recycling plastic bottles into plastic bottles; it’s recycling plastic bottles into clothing like Patagonia [www.treehugger.com] has been doing for awhile now.

TreeHugger has seen some great examples of the upcycling phenomenon. There have been some slightly odd things that we’ve seen; architect David Hertz took a Boeing 747 airplane and turned it in to a house [www.treehugger.com], for example, but there are lots of other mainstream examples. Argentinean designer Mercedes Bernárdez runs a firm called Chatarra, which means “metal scrap” in Spanish, who create everyday objects like vases, chairs and lamps [www.treehugger.com] from recycled aluminum. In the same vein, a company called Azcast makes furniture and interior decorations [www.treehugger.com] from sand-cast recycled aluminum (they’re so named because that’s how their products come out: “as cast”), and TreeHugger likes them well enough to have been featured twice [www.treehugger.com].

Metal certainly isn’t the only material that can be upcycled, though. We’ve found several examples of something as simple as newspaper (and other paper products) that’s been used to create well-designed, strikingly beautiful furniture. Check out designer Matt Gagnon’s paper side table [www.treehugger.com] or the incredible FlexibleLove expanding chair [www.treehugger.com] for more examples.

We also like to point people to Upcycle Art [www.treehugger.com], a site dedicated to inspiring us to see the value of materials in a product that has passed its prime and also offering comprehensive step-by-step instructions (with photos) of do-it-yourself upcycling projects. For another great example, hit up the Umbrella Inside Out design competitions [umbrella.treehugger.com], a duet of upcycling competitions for an all-new umbrella, and a couture garment made from nothing but old umbrellas; we think the results will probably surprise and impress you — they certainly did in the TreeHugger community. Upcycling is a great way to reuse materials, and becoming more prevalent and popular all the time. Stay tuned to our blog here for more great implementations of upcycling — it’s truly recycling for the 21st century.