of the particularly vulnerable toddlers in our homes.
Nature cannot afford such shortsighted and dangerous linear industrial processes. The natural world, powered by the sun, safely reuses all materials endlessly while using low-energy and low-temperature processes without persistent toxic compounds. The natural world’s approach for material use is universal, durable, and effective. To illustrate this point, let’s examine one of nature’s most common industrial activities — the capture, storage, and use of energy.
2.4Nature’s Path of Production
The sugar maple tree, common in the northeastern parts of the U.S., provides us with a good example of a natural production path that needs to be examined. A wide variety of benign chemical compounds are found in the leaf of a sugar maple tree. In summer, during the daytime, the leaf captures a portion of the sun’s energy that has traveled through space to Earth, while simultaneously reflecting the harmful ultraviolet portion of the solar energy spectrum back into space. Tiny openings in the underside of the leaf called stomata take in carbon dioxide, while a million root tips absorb water. During the night, the leaves of the maple tree convert this stored energy into incalculable chemical bonds of countless simple sugar molecules that become food for the tree. In the late fall, when the maple tree stops its sugar production because of cold weather and reduced daylight, the leaf falls to the ground, and eventually, this former food factory is eaten and broken down by a variety of detritus organisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and insect larva. Suspended in water and percolating through the soil, the dissolved materials gradually move downward, attaching and detaching from soil particles at various depths. During the time when these digested nutrients are in the root zone, root systems absorb and transport the valuable materials (formerly food factories) back into another plant where they will be used again, perhaps for leaf construction.
Natural processes like these routinely and repeatedly cycle vital elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous while using the locally acquired energy from the sun, and produce no persistent harmful materials. Rather, they add tremendous value to their community: green plants discard the only significant source of molecular oxygen on Earth as air emissions during the process of sugar production. Take a moment to consider the contribution of the Plant Kingdom to nature and our own lives. In addition to oxygen, the maple tree offers us delicious maple syrup for our pancakes, the beautiful grain and hue of maple furniture, and the glow and warmth of a fire from logs in our fireplaces.
Some early visionaries have already begun to tackle some of the core deficiencies in our industrial material strategies. In the early 1990s, the German chemist Michael Braungart conceived what he calls the Intelligent Product System, which consists of only three categories of industrial products: consumables, durables, and unmarketables.7 Partnering with the leading architect and designer William McDonough in the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle, he further refined this concept to two product categories. The first type, consumables or products of consumption, would be made only of biodegradable materials. When products of consumption lose their usefulness, they would be broken down in their entirety by detritus organisms of the natural world, and the resulting material would be made available for use by other organisms. Examples of products that might fall into this category are packaging materials, shoes, and ink pens. The second type of product, durables or products of service, would be made of materials toxic to living things, such as heavy metal alloys and some petroleum-based compounds. Products of service would be routinely leased by the customer and owned by the producer, and when they lose their usefulness, they would be returned to the manufacturer (completing the cycle), disassembled safely, and entirely reprocessed into a new generation of products. Kitchen appliances, cell phones, most vehicle components, and personal computers would be examples of this type of product. Incidentally, the term “circular economy” has found its way into movement jargon and refers to an economic system designed to eliminate resource waste and to continually reuse a material. The previously produced unmarketables (unusable toxins, such as nuclear waste) and monstrous hybrids (combined biodegradable and toxic compounds that now make up the vast majority of our manufactured goods) that fall into neither of the previous two categories would be phased out. At the technology levels currently available, these hybrids cannot be cycled or effectively reused, so they remain as bioavailable poisons that time-release their contamination into the biosphere and into our bodies. Clearly, these materials are examples of poor quality design.
In this new materials protocol, sustainable manufacturers would classify each of their merchandise items as a product of service or a product of consumption. Classification of products would be influenced by a number of factors, such as the logistics of a possible takeback system, materials’ composition and abrasion demands, and life expectancy of the product. Let’s apply this strategy to a common retail item — our clothing. How should we classify apparel?
As a product of consumption in this new paradigm, clothing would be made out of a variety of biodegradable materials, conditioners, and dyes. When the clothing items lose their usefulness, a trip to a composter for decomposition and the eventual return of the nutrients to our agricultural fields or gardens would fittingly complete the biological cycle for these materials. In order to eliminate soil degradation, fossil fuel pollution, synthetic pesticide and fertilizer pollution, and possible aquifer overdraft of conventional agriculture, the basic material used in our clothes (possibly cotton or hemp) would be grown via farming practices that use sustainable energy sources, enrich the soil fertility, and employ local workers at a wage that allows them to support their families.
As a product of service, clothing materials would be designed for use, reprocessing, and reuse for an indefinite number of times. With our considerable experience in crude oil-based synthetic textiles, the most expedient polymer-based raw material for apparel cloth would be petroleum; however, this choice carries environmental and social disadvantages that are similar to those presently associated with crude oil. Although thus far the performance of petroleum-based clothing items has exceeded that of bio-based materials, the more sensible and durable long-term raw material might be plant-based materials harvested from organic farming operations. Apparel companies implementing a product-of-service approach would also have to develop a convenient product return system that would transport worn-out clothing items back to the next-generation textile plants for reprocessing and reward customers for getting the outdated garment back to industry.
As this example implies, the initial product type design decision for clothing producers requires considerable thought, planning, and trial and error. Fortunately, a number of apparel companies have already begun the process. The outdoor-clothing company Patagonia, headquartered in Ventura, California, has taken the product-of-service approach with a line of clothing made from a polyester fabric called Capilene®. Patagonia, through its Common Threads program, accepts worn-out and laundered articles made of Capilene® brought into any local Patagonia retail store or mailed to their service center in Reno, Nevada. The company then ships the worn-out clothing items to a plant in Teijin, China on a nearly empty cargo vessel (China imports relatively little from the U.S.) that repolymerizes the crude oil-based material back into the Capilene® fabric. Patagonia is now planning to move the overseas processing to a western state such as Nevada. This innovation, while significantly increasing its domestic cloth and garment manufacturing facilities, would demonstrate an even deeper commitment to the foundational principles of sustainable business. These efforts would establish additional regional operational connections (as in the natural world) and would keep additional monies and jobs within the U.S.
A number of other clothing companies — Nau, Teko, and Wickers — have decided to take the products-of-consumption approach in the design of their materials with a corn-based fabric called Ingeo™. Other forward-thinking manufacturers are producing lines of clothing using soybean oil, wood fiber, coconut oil, and bamboo. Organic cotton-based clothing items would fall into the product-of-consumption category as long as any dyes and fabric conditioners were also made only from biodegradable compounds. These intrepid companies are committing to these technologies in hopes of spearheading a sustainable trend of apparel production. Does the product-of-service or product-of-consumption direction make more sense? Keep in mind that superior performance, durability, attractiveness, and affordability will accompany successful and intelligent product