This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
10 min read
Nora Griefahn’s office showcases her work better than words: The interior walls at the C2C LAB on a busy street in Berlin, Germany, are alive with lush, air-purifying plants; lamp shades have been grown from mycelium; in the kitchen, visitors can choose between tea cultivated via regenerative agriculture and beer brewed from bread waste. From the sustainable wood parquet to the office chair with its compostable cushions, most components can either be composted or dismantled and reused.
Located in a former pharmacy and medical practice, the 5,000-square-foot space of the Cradle to Cradle NGO is simultaneously headquarters, education center and real-world laboratory. “We wanted to demonstrate that we can renovate an old building that was full of toxins with Cradle to Cradle principles, so it’s not just a vision, but we can actually show how we built it,” Griefahn says. A poster behind her desk captures its central tenet: “Circle instead of crisis.”
According to the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) philosophy, every material is part of either a biological or technical circle. Biological material, such as cotton, that can safely biodegrade should return to the biosphere. Technical materials, such as metals and durable polymer, should remain in industrial systems to be recovered, reused or recycled nearly endlessly. Products containing both types should be designed so they can be separated cleanly, like the office chair with its reusable metal components and biodegradable cushioning.
Griefahn has spent much of her professional life spreading these ideas. She co-founded the Cradle to Cradle NGO with her partner Tim Janßen in 2012, while still a student. The NGO describes itself as an “accelerator” for Cradle to Cradle, connecting business, science, education, politics, culture and everyday citizens.
The database now shows thousands of objects that fulfill the C2C criteria — for example, the Shift Phone, a modular smartphone designed for easy disassembly, repair and reclamation. Or the Desso carpet. Its EcoBase backing can be separated from carpet yarn and recycled into new carpet. The manufacturer, Tarkett, takes back used carpet tiles. Because its waste is no longer toxic, the company claims it saves millions of dollars. Or the Loop Supermarket near Munich that is currently being built with modular timber, which turned out to be cheaper than conventional construction. Instead of merely reducing the environmental burden, the green roof actively increases local biodiversity.
A genuinely Cradle to Cradle building is not simply one with lower operational emissions. “Like a tree, it produces more energy than it uses,” Griefahn explains. It can be designed as a material bank, with components that can be disassembled, recovered and reused. A building, Griefahn argues, could create value beyond its walls in ways similar to a forest: improving air, managing water, restoring biodiversity or creating spaces where people want to gather.
Griefahn has grown up with this mission. Her mother is Monika Griefahn, a co-founder of Greenpeace and former Minister of the Environment in Germany. Her father is chemist Michael Braungart, professor for eco-design at the University of Lüneburg, who formulated the Cradle to Cradle concept alongside American architect William McDonough. Braungart has invented packaging that disintegrates into fertilizer, edible seat covers and compostable sneakers, along with hundreds of other products. McDonough has designed flagship buildings like NASA’s Sustainability Base in California, the Bosch Siemens Inspiration House in the Netherlands and Method’s production facility on Chicago’s South Side with the world’s largest (75,000-square-foot) rooftop greenhouse.
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Seventeen years ago, I spent a day traveling through the Netherlands with Braungart and McDonough, watching them try to convince corporate bosses and politicians to adopt C2C. Driving a car that only uses one gallon of gas for 100 miles instead of one using three gallons is like “bragging you used to hit your kids three times a day and now you only hit them once a day,” Braungart half-joked in front of Amsterdam’s mayor, before driving home the punchline: “When a system is destructive, we shouldn’t try to make it more efficient. Instead we need to completely reinvent it, so it becomes actually useful.”
In 1982, Braungart was the first to prove that plasticizers in popular products can impact human fertility, and he then watched in disbelief as the German government took a quarter century to ban them only in toys for children under three years old. Instead of analyzing products for thousands of toxins and relying on a slow, ineffective process of government oversight, Braungart advocates for a much more radical rethink: Only materials that do not harm humans and the planet should be allowed in the first place. In Braungart’s formulation, “everything is a nutrient.”
Cradle to Cradle is a close cousin of, but not synonymous with, recycling and the circular economy. “A circular economy, as largely discussed in public today, can still have toxic substances in the cycle,” Griefahn says. “The results are even more pollutants, making people sick.” Conventional sustainability often focuses on reducing harm: use less energy, produce less waste, emit less carbon, consume fewer resources. Recycling improves the picture by keeping some materials in circulation. Circular economy thinking goes further, aiming to eliminate the linear “take, make, waste” model by maintaining products and materials in cycles.
C2C’s design questions are broader: Is the product safe for people? Can its materials be recovered? Were workers protected during manufacture? Does it generate benefits for ecosystems rather than simply reduce its damage?
Essentially, Cradle to Cradle means consumers only need to consider two questions: Can I compost it? Or will the manufacturer take it back? This philosophy not only makes the common environmental credo to “limit your footprint” obsolete, but reverses it. “Make your footprint bigger!” Nora Griefahn says, “but in a beneficial way.” That means asking what a product should contain before designing it, taking into account its entire lifespan.
As a mother of four young children, she shakes her head at the birthstrike movement that advocates for childlessness as “the single most impactful decision a person can make to reverse climate change.” She sees her mission as making sure her children have a beautiful planet to live on.
I wanted to talk to Griefahn to understand how a new generation interprets the C2C concept decades after her father confidently announced it as the “next industrial revolution.” Big corporations including Airbus, Ford, Philips, Herman Miller and Nike have developed C2C-certified products, including the iconic Aeron chair, biodegradable seat covers for airplanes and cars, and sneakers that can be dismantled and reconfigured. Especially in the Netherlands, entire cities and communities have pledged C2C principles, including Venlo. And in Germany, several new buildings have been constructed according to C2C principles, for instance, the Moringa in Hamburg, Germany’s first residential C2C high rise with 212 apartments.
But overall, C2C is yet to scale. Most sneakers still end up in landfills. Construction remains one of the most climate-destructive industries on the planet. And the average citizen of an industrialized nation now generates more trash, not less. The average American produces nearly five pounds of trash per day, and half of that waste is landfilled. The world continues to move full-steam ahead with the toxic linear model: extract, manufacture, consume, discard. Let the next generation deal with the consequences.
Griefahn wants the discussion to become more ambitious. The motivation to spread the C2C gospel among her generation is one reason she founded the NGO. She worked with the German cult bands Die Ärzte and Die Toten Hosen, whose concerts became large-scale testing grounds for Cradle to Cradle-inspired solutions. Three hundred and thirty thousand people come to the concerts, effectively the population of a city. “They need to travel, eat, drink, use the bathroom and they buy products,” Griefahn says. “The concerts can be a learning process for our entire population.”
At the concerts, held over a five-year-period, the NGO and its partners tested 100 percent renewable electricity, C2C-certified merchandise like compostable t-shirts, and toilets that turn human waste into fertilizer and soil. An atmospheric water generator extracted drinking water from the air. About 85 percent of concertgoers arrived by public transport, bicycle or on foot, compared with roughly 55 percent by car at comparable events. Instead of establishing that “the most sustainable concert is the one that doesn’t take place,” Griefahn is keen to show that culture can be part of a positive system.
Rather than researching how to improve cars, she asks, “But what is actually the right mobility?” More public transport could reduce the need for roads and parking, freeing urban space for greenery and water management; shared vehicles could replace private ownership; and vehicles and infrastructure themselves could be designed around healthy, recoverable materials. At the C2C building The Cradle in Düsseldorf, a planned mobility hub allows tenants and neighbors to rent electric cars and e-bikes and return them after use.
“There are many places where Cradle to Cradle already works on a large scale,” Griefahn asserts, referring to cities and communities that have pledged to take up C2C standards. She also welcomes the European Commission’s 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan as a key element of the European Green Deal. Unlike conventional waste policy, the plan reaches upstream, into the design and production of products, with the aim of keeping resources in circulation for as long as possible. Since then, the EU has begun turning those ambitions into law. The 2024 Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation provides a framework for requiring products to be more durable, repairable and recyclable and to contain more recycled material. Its Digital Product Passport is designed to make information about a product’s materials, repairability and recyclability available throughout its life. The EU’s new right-to-repair rules push in the same direction.
But Griefahn also acknowledges the deeper challenges. She says too much policy remains focused on managing the next crisis rather than deciding what kind of society should exist in 10, 20 or 30 years. What if the objective is not merely to minimize our damage, but to design systems that create value for people and the natural world? “It is not about only reacting,” she says. “The question is: how do we actively shape a beautiful life for many?”
That question is much larger than recycling and much harder to deliver. But it’s also a much more compelling definition of progress.
The post Forget Recycling. What If We Could Compost or Reuse Everything? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
