Presently I am read­ing McDo­nough and Braungart’s Cra­dle to Cra­dle: Remak­ing the Way We Make Things. None of it is shock­ingly new to me, but it’s still star­tling to see the facts lined up in one place:

• 50% of the world’s trash is pack­ing material.
• prac­ti­cally every­thing gets thrown away eventually.
• it’s cheaper to throw things away than to repair them.
• the use of mate­ri­als from cheap Asian sources cir­cum­vents the efforts of devel­oped coun­tries to ban toxic chem­i­cals in the work­place and in the final product.

The list goes on.

I see a tremen­dous need for some­one to emerge as the author­ity for engi­neers on design­ing for the envi­ron­ment. What plas­tics should we use? What kind of pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als would be bet­ter in the long run? As this book points out, the answer is not as easy as choos­ing mate­ri­als that may be “recy­cled,” as in many cases the recy­cled prod­uct is not nearly as good as the original—or the recy­cling process pro­duces more harm to the envi­ron­ment than mak­ing a new product.

Why must every­thing use dis­pos­able pack­ag­ing? The pack­ag­ing prob­lem is painfully clear to me at work, where we are prepar­ing to move the office. We just threw away hun­dreds of card­board boxes that were lit­ter­ing the office. In the com­ing weeks, we are going to buy hun­dreds of fresh card­board boxes to fill with our crap. This kind of mad­ness hap­pens on a ridicu­lous scale every day.