I have a tendency to tear apart the documentaries in this class. This one is no exception on the aesthetic end. Poor camera work, poor choice of music, poor editing, etc.
However, the topic was far more fascinating, and much better presented than the past documentaries. Part of this was because of the poor aesthetics: they could not get in the way to make up for lacking content. And there was no need to make up for poor content choices: it was simply full.
At the heart of the documentary is the Cradle to Cradle movement and the two very awkward nerd-partners who envisioned it: William McDonough, an award-winning American architect, and Michael Braungart, a German physicist, Greenpeace advocate, and winner of the Strangest Analogy Award. It was on a New York rooftop that their vision of a better world (along with a delightful bromance) started. Their basis for a better world was a simple yet powerful statement: "Everything that is made from Biology [which is pretty much everything] should be able to safely return to the soil."
This sounds like a hopeless romantic ecologist's daydream, doesn't it? The thing is, it's not. Working with a German cloth manufacturer, Braungart was able to design both fabrics, cloths and dyes that were safe to produce and had no toxic materials in them. Most importantly though, it was just as financially feasible.
The two's work, which now is under the institution of MBDC, includes redesigning factories for Ford, working with Nike to manufacture completely Cradle to Cradle shoes, and even being apart of China's five-year sustainability plan. And while initial costs are great, the innovations often end up saving the company money while also improving work flow and moral.
Take, for instance, the Green Roof at the Ford Motor Plant in Detroit. The Bromancers (as I will lovingly refer to McDonough and Braungart from now on) designed a roof that was made up of grass and plants: a hefty investment that to many business men might seem like a whimsical fantasy expense. However, the roof, because it is growing, will not need to be replaced-only maintained with minimal repair. Re-roofing an entire car plant is a multi-million dollar job that would have to happen every ten-to-twenty years. Along with that, the Green Roof filters and purifies rainwater that would otherwise have to be shipped and chemically processed, saving the company even more money. And then, as icing on the cake, it uses materials that are natural and good for the earth, and even is home to many other creatures.
The power of of The Bromancers is that they take the grand utopian ideas and put them to work in a business-minded way. This is the basis behind Cradle-to-Cradle: putting our stuff to work. Waste becomes food for the earth. Food for innovation. Food for an industry. Or just food in general. Our dreams are put to work making industries not just more green, but more profitable.
"A building should be like a tree," Braungart tells us. It should grow, purify the air, produce fruit, be a home for creatures and produce things. It should respect it's inhabitants as individuals. A building should not just be sustainable; it should be beneficial. "If someone asked 'how is your relationship with your girlfriend,' and you replied, 'sustainable,' that's not a good answer." In the same way, we don't want a sustainable relationship with the earth, we want a good one. Sustainable is less bad. Less bad is still bad. What we want is good.
So must everything break down into organic waste? Not necessarily right away. In The Bromancer's world, there are two places waste can go: the ecosphere, or biology, or the technoshpere, back to production. Modern recycling takes a stab at this by the re-use of waste, but it fails in one area: recycled products are downcycled until they become waste again. In order for them to benefit the world better, they must be upcycled, or be refined into a better product. This means things should be easily disassembled, and made of plastics that can be refined or chemically altered to a better state. And of course, the end goal being that the plastic can bio-degrade to benefit the earth, and is not toxic to produce.
What The Bromancers are asking of all industries is far more than just sustainability; rather, it is a world where consuming things is beneficial, not harmful, to the world.
It is easy to be swept away by the utopian vision of a completely green world. I believe it is important: I do not believe it is the most important. We are still dealing with extreme poverty, drought, genocide, war, and not to mention the various emotional and physical disabilities we suffer from. A greener society will not fix all our problems. It may in fact, fix fewer than we feel, and will cause more than we think. This is the case with any changes made on this earth. However, I believe it is something important to be pursued on both the corporate level, and the smaller, household level as well.
And good Lord, that bow-tie. Damn classy.
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