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Eliminating the Concept Waste: A Philosophical Framework

While Nike, BASF, and Herman Miller might benefit from our hypothetical nylon Intelligent Materials Pool, companies from a variety of manufacturing sectors could collaborate to create material banks for nearly every valuable commodity, from chemicals to steel to advanced polymers. To do so, the goal of materials pooling can be nothing less than eliminating the concept of waste.

Eliminating the concept of waste means recognizing materials as nutrients that cycle through either the biological metabolism or the technical metabolism. The biological metabolism is made up of natural processes that circulate the pool of materials or nutrients—water, oxygen, soil, CO2—that support life on Earth. The technical metabolism, designed to mirror natural nutrient cycles, is a closed loop system in which valuable, high-tech synthetics and mineral resources circulate in an endless cycle of production, recovery and reuse.

Intelligent Products: I first outlined this model of industry in 1992 as the Intelligent Product System (IPS), which is a framework for creating materials and goods that flow safely and productively within these closed-loop systems. In the IPS, design emulates nature's material flows. Every product ingredient is designed to be safe and beneficial; to naturally biodegrade and restore the soil or to provide high quality resources for the next generation of products. In short, every material is conceived as a nutrient and ultimately, every product as a service.

This insight emerged from an EPEA chemical assessment of a television set that found 4,360 different chemicals, many of them hazardous, in its various components. Why own hazardous waste when what you really want is to watch TV? And, from a business perspective, why sell televisions and lose their value forever when you can provide the service of television viewing and recover your valuable technical materials when your customer wants a new model? When a television, or a car, or a computer is conceived as a product of service, its materials can be designed as nutrients that nourish a business again and again.

The Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol: The fundamental understanding of materials as nutrients is also the foundation of MBDC's Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol, an ecologically intelligent industrial design process William McDonough and I have been developing since 1992. Following the steps of the Protocol, manufacturing companies worldwide are creating products and materials designed as biological or technical nutrients. Products such as these are the cornerstones of nutrient recovery systems.

The nutrient recovery system of the biological metabolism is ubiquitous: the natural processes go on around us all the time. Products designed to naturally biodegrade, such as the fabrics we've designed with Rohner Textil, DesignTex, and Pendleton, are made of renewable materials and can be used as mulch when they wear out. As long as every ingredient in a product designed for the biological metabolism is healthful, it can flow safely back into the earth's nutrient cycles to feed the growth of new biological materials. Appropriate systems for returning these nutrients to the soil are becoming more common as municipalities develop composting facilities to complement traditional waste management strategies.

Managing the Technical Metabolism: While nature manages the cycles of the biological metabolism, an Intelligent Materials Pool is the management system for the technical metabolism. Traditionally, materials have not been defined as nutrients, and technical and biological materials have been mixed and discarded, contaminating each sphere. Instead of polluting the biosphere and dumping valuable technical materials, losing their value forever, why not close the industrial loop and make these rare ingredients perpetually available to industry for a variety of technical purposes?

To do so, technical materials like alloys, stabilizers and polymers must be designed to be used again and again. Intelligent materials make this possible. Some polymers, for instance, can be recycled more than 90 times without losing performance quality. Intelligently designed steel can be recycled endlessly. As products and materials are increasingly designed as nutrients, Intelligent Materials Pooling offers a system designed to maximize their value through many product life cycles. It's a technical nutrient management system that generates material assets rather than material liabilities-it eliminates the concept of waste.

Creating Material Pools with Industrial Partners: Companies can begin to develop and benefit from Intelligent Materials Pooling by following a step-by-step process that generates a community of businesses sharing nutrients, information and values. As we have seen, the process follows the same steps as almost any kind of community building: As members find common cause and provide support for one another, the separate elements of the community begin to gel, forming a shared identity grounded in mutual trust.

The key steps in the development of a community of shared values bear repeating: The community decides what it does not want; it chooses what it does want; its members support each other against those who endanger the community; a culture bound by shared values forms.

From an industrial design perspective, the community would come together out of a mutual interest in the values and principles of Cradle to Cradle Design-eco-effectiveness, eliminating the concept of waste, supporting life-and the steps of the Protocol, which would provide partners with the practical tools for success. The process looks something like this:

Phase 1: Creating Community
	Identify shared values: Cradle to Cradle Design, eliminating the concept of waste
	Identify willing industrial partners
	Target specific toxic chemicals for replacement
Phase 2: Utilizing Market Strength
	Share list of materials targeted for reduction and elimination
	Develop a positive purchasing and procurement list of preferred intelligent chemicals
Phase 3: Defining Material Flows
	Specify for and design with preferred materials
	Define use periods for products and services
	Create a materials bank
	Design a technical metabolism for preferred materials
Phase 4: Ongoing Support
	Create preferred business partner agreements among members
	Share information gained from material use and research
	Develop co-branding strategies
	Support the mechanisms of the technical metabolism

Finding willing partners might be hard to imagine in the competitive world of business but it is hardly unprecedented. In the textile industry innovative mills like Victor Innovatex and Rohner Textil, along with MBDC and DesignTex, have profitably collaborated on the design and production of ecologically intelligent fabrics. In the textile and apparel industry at large, several companies we have worked with have expressed deep interest in joining together to create a "polyester coalition." With the technology for truly recycling polyester in development, a polyester collective could begin to close the loop on the flow of this widely used industrial material.