Anne-Marie Rakhorst
Businesswoman Anne-Marie Rakhorst was so inspired by Cradle to Cradle that she took the initiative to promote the Dutch edition of the book. Wherever possible, she integrates the C2C concept into her own company, Search, an international engineering and consultancy agency, in the sustainable solutions she thinks up for her clients. ‘We shouldn’t be consuming less, but more’ sounds provocative in an age in which the world is worried about climate, energy and natural resources. But with their revolutionary ‘Cradle to Cradle’ concept, chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough have proved that economic growth need not be at the expense of the environment at all. Their book Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things shows clearly how this can be done. The Dutch translation was recently published on the initiative of businesswoman Anne-Marie Rakhorst, director of Search Engineering. The book became available from bookshops on 1 November.
Waste = food
‘Cradle to Cradle’, the trailblazing concept put forward by Michael Braungart and William McDonough, is beginning to make headway all over the world. The philosophy is simple. From now on, we must only design intelligent products, made from sound, fully decomposable materials that we can continually return to technical or biological metabolisms. Waste thus becomes food again and materials remain endlessly reusable.
Next industrial revolution
Current environmental thinking urges us to ‘limit, reuse and recycle’ or in other words to be ‘eco-efficient’: do more with less to limit the damage. But this preserves the ‘Cradle to Grave’ production model that produces escalating waste mountains and pollution. Braungart and McDonough are challenging the world to design products as well as buildings and cities more intelligently, and to set up clean and especially ‘eco-effective’ production processes. Taking waste = food as their guiding principle and drawing from their experiences designing and redesigning products, they prove that eco-effectiveness is the definitive answer.
Braungart and McDonough demonstrate that their concrete, very practical Cradle to Cradle concept (C2C) could bring about the next industrial revolution. The circle of clients is growing day by day: from multinationals like Ford, Unilever, Nike, Herman Miller, BP and BASF to a country like China, where they are building six new cities, based entirely on C2C. In the Netherlands they are buckling down to working on the Venlo distribution centre that will be fully in line with the C2C design concept by 2012.
Dutch promoter
At the end of 2006 Anne-Marie Rakhorst took part in one of Michael Braungart’s workshops in London. She became so inspired by the boundless opportunities offered by his philosophy that she decided to integrate this philosophy wherever possible in the sustainable solutions her company was thinking up for its clients. Not only that, she wanted to pass on her enthusiasm to as many policy-makers, politicians and publishers as possible. In the meantime, she published her own book, Sustainable Development... a Global Opportunity, a collection of ideas, models and options for sustainability. At the same time, she took the initiative to have a Dutch edition of Braungart and McDonough’s book published, which has now appeared entitled Cradle to Cradle – afval = voedsel (Cradle to Cradle – waste = food).
