ANOTHER LIFE:
THE PROSPECT of another great
sweep of green fields - some of the best land on the island - being
annexed as a new tip for Dublin's waste sent me to this newspaper's
digital archive and a features page headed "The Waste Land" that I
put together in 1974, writes
Michael Viney.
It included a bland rejection of recycling (as Denmark, for one, had begun to do) from the then city manager.
Landfill, he assured me, with his macho shake of the head, was your only man. More than 30 years on, recycling bins and bottle banks are a commonplace of Dublin, but the region's irreducible, often toxic, discards demand still another great hole in the ground.
In 1977 the Vineys took off to the west and a life in which compost bins and recycled cow manure loomed, if anything, too large. In that same year, as it happens, a young Yale architectural student called William McDonough designed and built the first solar-heated house in Ireland. The fact is still prominent in a CV full of international honours, not least recognition as "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine in 1999. "His utopianism," it declared, "is grounded in a unified philosophy that - in demonstrable and practical ways - is changing the design of the world."
McDonough's "cradle to cradle" philosophy has been expounded at endless high-powered forums at January's global gathering at Davos, for example, and the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. The internet offers several long video sessions of him talking (at Wikipedia, a link to a full documentary). Sheer reiteration can sometimes set him off at breakneck speed, as if he were tired listening to himself, but he did slow down in Abu Dhabi.
There's also the book, Cradle to Cradle, written with his German chemist colleague, Michael Braungart. It's printed on recyclable plastic, with print that can be washed off, rather than on paper made from trees - one demonstration of the "flow of nutrients" with which McDonough would reorganise the manufacturing world.
Nature wastes nothing in the end: waste from one organism is food for another, or the soil. Only people make things that are useless or even toxic to earth. Most of them end up in landfills, or under hedges, or in the sea. Some are recycled, but lose value in the process.
In McDonough's thinking, goods should be designed to snap apart easily into two sorts of substance: one biodegradable kind to feed the soil and bring new growth; the other, of safe, synthetic material that recycles profitably into hi-tech manufacture. He has done it already with carpets and furniture. As consultants to Nike, McDonough and Braungart have helped to develop trainers with polymer uppers that can return to industrial use again and again and soles that are - eventually - biodegradable.
Looking to nature for closed, efficient nutrient systems is not new. Eliminating waste and toxicity from the whole manufacturing process and products has been a basic green tenet for decades. When Ireland suddenly found the millions for applied science I dreamed, along with many, that eliminating waste might be declared a national policy objective, not only an example to the world, like stopping smoking, but a high-earning export of knowledge.
Meanwhile, China, of all places, is showing definite signs, or at least avowals, of seeking green solutions. The Beijing government's adoption of the design approach spelled out in Cradle to Cradle is a proud boast of Mc Donough & Partners, now based in Virginia in the US. They have even been commissioned to design half a dozen Chinese eco-cities - this in some compensation, one must hope, for the current, smog-laden sins.
"Our vision owes much to Chinese culture," says the foreword to the special Chinese edition of Cradle to Cradle. "The idea that humanity can have a mutually beneficial relationship with the biological world is the foundation of the 4,000-year-old tradition of Chinese agriculture." The recycling of human "night soil" may, indeed, be expected to continue, if by more refined processes, to nourish the roof-top allotments and rice fields planned for the new metropolises.
On a holiday in Venice a couple of years ago, I visited the huge architectural Biennale on the future of cities and there saw striking models of what McDonough is trying to create: cities moulded like mountains and terraced with green roofs to grow food, thus replacing the farmland they take for construction.
The planted roof has already provided some of McDonough's corporate spectaculars. A four-hectare sheet of sedums and mosses roofing Ford's great truck plant at Dearborn and a lush roof garden for Chicago's city hall have demonstrated long-term savings in fuel costs and repairs as well as absorbing and filtering rainfall. In McDonough's new designs, tall buildings copy trees in making oxygen, creating energy, recycling waste and water and even changing colour with the seasons.
If ever "sustainable" thinking needed a business-savvy hero, McDonough seems to be it. He's also an optimist, but then you'd have to be.