Chapter one mainly discusses the Industrial revolution and its positive and negative effects. In one hand, it gave us modern, improved life, cultural and natural richness and on the other hand created a culture that dominates and exploits nature without limit, and continues to generate waste, pollution, crude production chipping away the basic achievements. I like how it describes the whole invention or the design as a strategy of tragedy and suggests that it is high time to rethink and redesign.
Chapter two talks about eco-efficiency and how to achieve it through recycle, reduce, reuse and regulate. It will change the whole idea of living.
Chapter three opens up with example with various types of book production to ask the question, What is efficient production and growth? Every process has side effects; however, we can solve the problem. We need to rethink the entire production line, and product life cycle once it goes into the hands of the user and its effect on nature in its entirety. Then we can come up with inventive solutions like the idea of recycling waste as a plant food.
Chapter four title “Waste is food” aptly describes its content. The authors discuss how in traditional societies, whether nomadic or agrarian, waste products would either completely be consumed by natural cycle and return to nature (bio-products), or be continually reused and recycled as valuable, like metals and metal made objects. With industrial world came ‘monstrous hybrids’ which cannot decompose properly, thereby draining nature of its resources, leaving a trail of poison everywhere it goes, and adds to the future problem of sustainability of life on earth. These, the authors refer to as ‘unmarketable products’, which need to be stored currently to be detoxified with future technologies as they become available.
Chapter five: I like how the authors describe the diversity of needs and desires. Creating something that can be use over and over. For example, using the jam bottle as a glass tumbler once the jam was gone, is very practical, elegant and has large impact on environment.
Chapter six talks about how to put the ideas that the rest of the book discusses into practice. It talks about new ways (products, constructions) of solving problems, with impact on individual user’s needs as well as societal impact and overall, its effects on environment. One perfect such example of this that I find is neither a product nor a simple construction, but an entire city built on the concept of efficient, eco-living. It is called the Masdar Project, which claims to be near one hundred percent self sustainable in energy and water resources, with near zero net carbon footprint, while living in ultra-high tech comfort.
| Inside Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, UAE |
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