A package is worth a thousand words

          William McDonough has been of particular interest to me for quite a few years now.  He is the founder of "Cradle to Cradle", which is a philosphy that is based on the concept of closed loop product cycles.  There are two such cycles outlined, one being a technical nutrient cycle, and the other being a biological nutrient cycle.  I was inspired this week by the biological nutrient cycle, which means that products that we produce can be safely be returned to the earth.  Think of of a tree, a tree grows its leaves, they serve their purpose(photosynthesis, for the tree to grow), and then they die and fall off.  The leaves then are broken down by organisms, and the nutrients are returned to the soil for the tree to use again. 
           My solution is to make all packaging like this.  We grow the packaging, we use it, then we discard it to the earth to become nutrients for the soil.  This came about to me from getting Rib Crib for dinner.  From my order of chicken breast, toast, fries, and sauce, I had several different containers which were comprised of a variety of materials.  There were styrofoam containers, wax paper bags, plastic cups with foil lids, a paper bag, and a plastic bag.  None of this can be composted.  Most of it can't even be recycled.  So it all goes to the landfill.  In my solution, all of this would go to a compost heap in my backyard, to be returned to the soil.  Think about it, those packages were used to get my food home, they had a life of about 15 minutes.  That is a lot of resources just to be immediately taken to the landfill. 
         Now, I recognize most people do not have a compost heap.  This is most likely due to not much of anything being compostable.  But if were were to switch over to compostable packaging, instead of having recycling bins, we would just have a compost heap in the backyard.  It would also provide good soil which could be used for gardening, which many people are beginning to do again.  This concept is similar to Roehner, a textile company faced with the challenge of being sustainable in an economical way.  Think about the fuel savings that the city would see if they have substantially less garbage every week.  Because you are composting instead of throwing things away in the trash, the garbage truck will have further to go before it has to go dump in the landfill.  If it got dramatic enough, the truck could even be smaller, because of the greatly reduced load.  It may not even be necessary as a garbage truck, it may become a technical nutrient truck, picking up only things that can be reused and recycled.
       This concept is feasible, we must just be motivated, like William McDonough, and advocate that it be done.  Packaging accounts for a large volume of our trash, if we take care of it in a sustainable manner, we can substantially reduce our dependence on landfills.

You want to recycle what?!?

This week I would like to continue down the city's path and focus on the buildings themselves a little more carefully.  I realize that not everything we build is meant to last centuries, so what about those buildings?  What do we do with them?  Well, currently, unless they are steel framed, they go straight to the landfill.  No recycling, whatsoever.  We recycle our plastic, why not recycle our buildings too!

The first part of this deals with last week's reading for item number one on the list: use waste as a resource.  When we tear down a building and put it into a landfill, we are wasting precious resources.  Yes, some homes may have somethings taken out, like light fixtures,bricks and door knobs, but what about the studs, the shingles, and the drywall?  Heck, what about the thousands of nails, screws, and other metal fasteners?  My idea is to set up a recycling service for buildings.  When you tear down a house, a team of people come and tear it down bit by bit for its valuable resources.  These resources would then be reused, melted down, or chopped up to make new resources.  This would also save on fuel costs, to the environment and the consumer, from not having to ship in new material from elsewhere around the globe.   A study done on tshirts could be applied to this as well, "it concluded that the environmental cost of transportation was significant and amount to about half the cost..."

The second part to this plan is that most likely this type of recycling program would be carried out at a local or at least regional level.  This service would provide a community with needed jobs and also provide new materials for new local factories.  Those pieces from the house need to be made into something else somewhere.  Why not have the local wood factory shred the old studs and make them into plywood, or the nail factory take old nails and make them into new nails.  Again, we do this with plastic bottles, why not with building materials.  This would be considered a "holistic, cradle-to-grave approach..."  in which we think not only about the first use, but the second, the third, and so on (Quinn).

So in conclusion, recycling can apply to everything we use, bot just fabrics and plastic bottles.  We need to think smarter, not harder in how we go about this, and we will ultimately live better lives because of it.

I'm kind of an introvert...in an extroverted way.

Part of my vision is conservation, which is defined by using enough to meet your needs.  I am going to focus that vision on a particular field: the construction industry.  According to Benyus, we should "...Build for durability, but...don't overbuild." Prior to the crash, cities were building infrastructure and plotting land as fast, or faster than developers could build on it.  This fed to the already well ingrained problem of suburbanization in America.  In some extreme cases, the cities were almost bankrupting themselves just to offer roads, sewers, and water to developments that never came.  If that isn't the definition of unsustainable, I'm not sure what is.  My plan is to rethink how we conceive and grow cities.

Step one of that plan is to lock down zoning.  No future outward growth, unless absolutely necessary.  This means moving up instead of out, closer together instead of farther apart.  Open land can and should be considered a nonrenewable resource.  Once built upon it is extremely costly to convert that land back to the open pasture it once was.  It is like what Benyus said, "Cutting into the growing stock of the forest is like damaging the goose with the golden eggs..."  If we are to continually increase our population, open land will actually need to increase!  Currently that is being met by cutting down forests for cropland, but we already know the gross effects of doing that.  What if you got a tax credit for building in the city instead of in the suburbs?  How different would our society look today.

Step two of the plan is to build better buildings, and by better, I mean more durable, long-term resource conscious buildings.  Europe is a wonderful example of this.  Many of the buildings are made of stone or brick that were built hundreds of years ago, but are still being used today.  Here in the united states, many buildings are torn down well before they are even 50 or 100 years old.  This is due to the relatively cheap construction cost, and relatively cheap replacement cost.  If we were to build out of more durable materials, they would be more expensive, and we would be less likely to tear them down.  Now, we can not convert completely to this way of building, because we should "[not] use nonrenewable resources faster than you can develop substitutes."