Concept: Cradle-to-Cradle

There was a meeting Dec 13 with “Bridgett Luther, former Director of Conservation for California and now President of Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (a Non-Profit that will evaluate products and provide C2C certification) will be coming to Stanford with some of her Institute’s partners from China.” I didn’t go, but the meeting was about Craig Criddle’s work with bioplastics and biocomposites. I Googled “Cradle to Cradle” to find out what it means and found “Cradle to Cradle Design (sometimes abbreviated to C2C, or Cradle 2 Cradle, or in some circles referred to as regenerative) is a biomimetic approach to the design of systems. It models human industry on nature’s processes in which materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and synthetic materials.” This is a step more than the preceding “Cradle to Grave” approach of which we now hear a lot about Life Cycle Analysis. It may be an interesting thought exercise for students to graph the C2C cycle of something that they own such as a laptop, cell phone or digital camera (or maybe something that actually decomposes).