Waste not, want not

In keeping with my reading plan, I’ve just read William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s treatise, Cradle to Cradle. The book discusses traditional environmental and industrial philosophy and is a call to adopt a new design ethic with roots in both mass-customization and systems ecology.
The authors summarize recent industrial history, with some emphasis on the USA, noting both early design successes and a few of the causes for environmental negligence and exploitation. They also outline what they see as fundamental shortcomings of modern environmental thought. On the latter, they sometimes degenerate into a practice unfortunately common within the environmental camp, flogging anything that sounds mainstream. (They also use entirely too many parenthetical asides.)
However, accepting this and the fact that the book sometimes reads like recycled marketing collateral, their positions have considerable merit. McDonough and Braungart envision a broad design school that gives appropriately equitable weight to economy, environment, and ethics. They propose an overhaul of design practices to be appropriate to local environments and to eliminate the concept of waste, in favor of cycles of reusable resources.
For my part, I am a little concerned over the notion of a wholesale (or even very broad) shift of an economy of products to an economy of services. The authors suggest an ingenious and potentially highly efficient economy in which the raw materials within most products are essentially leased. In this scenario, for instance, when you were “done” with your car, the manufacturer would reclaim the vehicle which could then be reintroduced into the manufacturing process and become an entirely new car.
This model belies the authors’ backgrounds (McDonough, an architect; Braungart, a chemist) as knowledge-workers. From the knowledge worker’s perspective, wealth is developed by directly creating something valuable, or adding value to a process or product. For many others, building wealth is predicated in some part upon the ownership of resources. This becomes difficult in an economy in which every resource of any transferable value belongs to a corporation.
Despite this and some comparatively minor points of argument, I think Cradle to Cradle is an excellent read. Students of business, economics, and environmental disciplines should make a point of reading it. In the spirit of the book, borrow it from your library or buy it from a local book shop. If you have any recommendations for books, please post.