Sustainabilty and Cradle to Cradle

The industry is spending huge sums of money on dealing with environmental issues, on compliance, and trying to deal with future worries over landfill.  In some places I have been recently like Ethiopia and Pakistan inefficient or non-existent treatment which is doing serious long term damage  to the ground water and to the health of the general population.

At the other end of the scale the huge volume of shoes going into is not sustainable and we must ask ourselves questions about the proper length of life of a product made of leather and what should happen to the product at that time.

From lifecycle to recycle and beyond

Really far thinking companies take this one step further and adopt the cradle to cradle philosophy (Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart) which rejects the production concepts born of the industrial revolution.  These embodied abusing the planet's resources through excessive consumption and thoughtless waste and designing products which used up what we now to be scarce resources with one time, one way use.  Cradle to grave now covers putting toxic waste into landfill and telling ourselves they are at least safe.  According to Cradle to Cradle products have biological and technical nutrients within them and at the end of life of a product these need to be separated out for proper re-use. The biological elements can returned to the land as the leaves fall from the trees and the chemical elements should be extracted for correct re-use.  "Safe landfill" should not be an option nor should re-cycling which involves leaving significant or pertinent technical content in the material.  Using chrome leather pieces out of old leather products for running tracks may be well intentioned, but it is not right.  Traditional re-cycling may be better than waste but it reduces our guilt rather than removes it.

This is the approach I am commtited to and is the subject of reseach projects in the Leather Futures Research Group at the University of Northampton

Mike talks about Cradle to Cradle

I talked about Cradle to Cradle at Fashion Access in Hong Kong October 2008 and the above link should allow you to hear it. Click on the text above to listen in full