Reva McAulay
MHC 200 Weekly Writeup #7
10.22.12
The differences between optimizing the existing solution, re-engineering the solution, and re-defining the problem seem rather vague, but I guess its just a matter of how much work it takes. So optimizing the existing solution is anything that keeps the bulk of the process intact, while re-engineering the solution changes most of it. And re-defining the problem means coming up with an entirely different solution.
The three design principles of cradle-to-cradle make it seem a lot easier than I’m sure it is. Using current solar income is very do-able, just a little more expensive. Celebrating diversity doesn’t seem like a challenge at all, as its actually probably the easiest and most efficient way anyway. The really tricky one is turning waste into food, as there are still lots of kinds of wastes that no one knows how to re-use, or at least not without enormous cost. In this case, it is almost certainly easier to create processes that produce easily re-usable wastes than to try to convert dangerous chemical wastes into inputs for another process. The easy ones, the wastes that we already know how to re-use at a low cost, are unfortunately also mostly the less harmful ones. Except for plastic, which is easy to re-use but for some reason often is not.
So if cradle-to-cradle engineering is technically viable, why isn’t it everywhere? Again with the economics. Or, probably more accurately, the lack of forethought amongst the people who make business decisions. There are plenty of success stories of companies that, to a limited extent anyway, made environmentally-friendly decisions and benefitted from it. For instance, when HP decided to start developing non-lead based solders for no other reason than that they knew lead was toxic, they had a working non-lead solder already in place when the EU banned lead in electronics(http://www.businessandsociety.be/assets/ee902e549915b8586e8a8daa338e073e.pdf). So basically when everyone else was scrambling and spending lots of money to figure out how to follow the EU’s restrictions, HP already had something that didn’t have any side effects and was cost-efficient. It’s always better to be ahead of the game, whether you’re expecting government regulations or the eventual limited supply and high prices of fossil fuels.
While a number of people are saying that the government should step in and fund cradle to cradle processes if businesses aren’t willing to do it, I don’t think that is the solution. The government should be funding cradle to cradle manufacturing, but they have a very minor role in the manufacturing of the huge amount of stuff that gets made every day. There’s no way the government could afford to subsidize every industry that should be using these principles. In any case, businesses should decide that it is worth it to implement them without government support. If no one can or will take the time to make cradle to cradle cost efficient on a grand scale, it will never catch on the way it should. What the government should do is fund research on how to make it cheaper, and ensure that it is used in the industries the government can have more control of—say, electricity.
Random noticing of the day: glancing through the Wikipedia article on Cradle to Cradle Engineering, the Chinese government is listed as one of the major implementers of Cradle to Cradle engineering. Not to knock China here but I think if the US government is falling behind China’s in environmentally friendliness, there might be a problem.
