Set reading 1- Cradle to Cradle

Cradle to cradle First of all, I was surprised of the material that is used for this book. It is not paper that we are familiar. So before I started reading this book, I already questioned many things with just touching it. – Why this book is made by plastic? What is the purpose of it? Is there any meaning? Isn’t it expensive to print on plastic? Is this recyclable? 

 

 Once I read the introduction part, “This Book Is Not A Tree”, I understood why they used the plastic. The author is also asking, do we know what all the products around us made by? The author also mentioned that we are unknowingly becoming party to a process of waste and destruction. I believe that the author dares us to think about the earth’s resources.  This book is talking about “Changing how humans relate to our environment” 

 

With Cradle to cradle, the chapter one was quite interesting part for me. 

 

A question of design - The authors say that our current technology is “cradle to grave” design, which means we use resources from the earth and make it into a product and use it. After we use it, just throw it away. 

 

“Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. But where is “away’? Of course, “away” does not really exist. “Away” has gone away. Cradle-to-grave designs dominate modern manufacturing.” 

 

 I really like this sentence and it says the truth. Everyday, we buy something, use them and throw them “away”. But I think it is a reality of current people’s behaviour and it continues. So in this book, the author tells us what to do instead of just wasting resources again and again. The author also mentioned “ the product itself contains on average 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.”   

 

Also the authors mentioned that the threat of global warming brought about by the build-up of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activities. As we know global warming is becoming very serious day by day and behind that, there is human selfishness. According to the “cradle to grave”, we keep wasting resources but don’t take action that much. Most of people don’t take this issue seriously including much and we keep destroying our planet.  So we use more energy that we get from the nature. They suggest how environment affects the intangible quality of human life, and how applying these same philosophies to architecture and urban planning can produce amazing results.

 

I think this book is very useful and relating to our project topic as well. And there are many inspiring thoughts.  The authors’ writing is very clear and easy to understand so it inspired me a lot for my group work. Also this year with other studio, we also had a project of sustainability and recycling so the thoughts of the authors helped me a lot as well.