It’s time for one of my infamous badly worded book reviews. I recently finished reading Cradle To Cradle, a superb book about “remaking the way we make things“. It outlines a completely new way of looking at reducing and reusing to better reduce human impact on the world. The key idea is that what we currently view as reusing and recycling, such as recycling old newspapers, has a crucial flaw in that the new product created is in worse quality than the original.

Cradle to Cradle describes manufacturing through the ages and documents how little it has changed. Just as in the past, manufacturing involves extracting unused resources and turning it into a product that cannot be recycled, and is eventually thrown away into a landfill as garbage. However, there could be a superior methodology of using resources that mimics that of nature’s. Instead of creating things with only its current lifespan in mind, every product should be created with the intent that it can be reused in the future as something of equal quality.

One problem with green products that currently exists is the expensive price premium over similar non green products. Although this may be true, Cradle to Cradle shows how green design is in face even more economical than traditional products when the entire manufacturing process is analyzed.

Even the book itself embodies the ideals it describes as it’s made of some sort of plastic so that the entire book can be melted down and recycled into an entirely new book of perfect quality. You would think that a plastic book would feel strange, but as a plastic book, it felt even better than paper and it’s resistant to water. This is a must read book that will change the way you look at recycling and design.