Cradle-to-cradle design
[1] It is a holistic, economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not only efficient but also essentially waste free.
[2] Building off the whole systems approach of John T. Lyle's regenerative design, the model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many aspects of human civilization such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems.
[4][5] The current model is based on a system of "lifecycle development" initiated by Michael Braungart and colleagues at the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA) in the 1990s and explored through the publication A Technical Framework for Life-Cycle Assessment.
[6] In the cradle-to-cradle model, all materials used in industrial or commercial processes—such as metals, fibers, dyes—fall into one of two categories: "technical" or "biological" nutrients.
Currently, many human beings come into contact or consume, directly or indirectly, many harmful materials and chemicals daily.
[citation needed] The question of how to deal with the countless existing technical nutrients (synthetic materials) that cannot be recycled or reintroduced to the natural environment is dealt with in C2C design.
The shoe is mass-produced at a manufacturing plant that utilizes its waste material by putting it back into the cycle, potentially by using off-cuts from the rubber soles to make more soles instead of merely disposing of them; this is dependent on the technical materials not losing their quality as they are reused.
[11] C2C principles were first applied to systems in the early 1990s by Braungart's Hamburger Umweltinstitut (HUI) and The Environmental Institute in Brazil for biomass nutrient recycling of effluent to produce agricultural products and clean water as a byproduct.
See for instance the LCA-based model of the eco-costs, which has been designed to cope with analyses of recycle systems.
[25] The cradle-to-cradle model in some implementations is closely linked with the car-free movement, such as in the case of large-scale building projects or the construction or redevelopment of urban environments.
It is closely linked with passive solar design in the building industry and with permaculture in agriculture within or near urban environments.
This makes the extraction of rare-earth elements and other materials uneconomical (at recycling sites, products typically get crushed after which the materials are extracted by means of magnets, chemicals, special sorting methods, ...) and thus optimal recycling of, for example metals is impossible (an optimal recycling method for metals would require to sort all similar alloys together rather than mixing plain iron with alloys).
Also, the European Training Network for the Design and Recycling of Rare-Earth Permanent Magnet Motors and Generators in Hybrid and Full Electric Vehicles (ETN-Demeter)[26] makes designs of electric motors of which the magnets can be easily removed for recycling the rare earth metals.
Many critics pleaded for a public-private partnership overseeing the C2C concept, thus enabling competition and growth of practical applications and services.
Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, head of the German Wuppertal Institute, called his assertion that the "old" environmental movement had hindered innovation with its pessimist approach "pseudo-psychological humbug".
Quantitative methodologies (LCAs) and more adapted tools (regarding the product type which is considered) could be used in tandem.
