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Thursday, 10 March 2005 | marketallica
C2C Design
a symbol of design failure
C2C Design. C2C -- it stands for Cradle-To-Cradle, and it is the emerging green-friendly standard of industrial design, reports Rebecca Smith in The Wall Street Journal. "Pollution is a symbol of design failure," says architect William McDonough, who along with chemist Michael Braungart set forth the C2C manifesto in their book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. "We want clean production that's based on a regenerative technology," says William. By that he means developing products "in the two main cradle-to-cradle categories -- 'biological nutrients,' such as those made from plants that can be returned to the earth and 'technical nutrients' like those made from metals and plastics that can be recycled." Architects are getting into C2C in a big way -- in fact, a total of 625 C2C home designs recently were entered in a competition, including one featuring a "photovoltaic 'skin' ... that produces electricity."
Office furniture designers, such as Steelcase, are also embracing the C2C trend. Steelcase's Think chair, for example, "is 99 percent recyclable," and made without "benzene, lead, mercury or solvents." Not only that, the chair is "made at factories that buy 'green,' or renewable power, from sources like wind turbines and solar panels." Shaw Industries, shawfloors.com, "the nation's biggest carpet maker ... now guarantees buyers that it will recycle all carpet squares, and an 800-number is stamped on the back of each tile for customers to call to have tiles picked up." Herman Miller, hermanmiller.com, now demands that "all its vendors submit exact specifications and chemical ingredients of the materials they supply." Its Mirra office chair features a "fabric made from extracts of corn" that "can be stripped off and composted while about 96 percent of the chair can be recycled."
Currently, C2C designs account for only about five percent of Herman Miller's sales, but the company expects that will increase to 50 percent by 2010. In part that's because consumer demand for C2C is growing, but it's also because "the economics of green design are changing ... The recent run up in the price of oil, for instance, has pushed up the price of petrochemicals and made it more cost-effective to recycle the old synthetic material." Some companies are playing it safe by starting their C2C experiments "with products that are already particularly profitable, giving them latitude" to try new things. Of course, one big fly in the cornsilk is that just because all of this stuff can be recycled doesn't mean it will be. BASF, for example, came up with a packing foam that "can be ground up and recycled." But as Gene Zimmerman of BASF points out: "The challenge is getting it back [from customers] to recycle it."
Resource : Reveries.Com
Links: http://www.c2c-home.org
http://www.hermanmiller.com/CDA/SSA/Produc...40-p205,00.html
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