In a maximum-security prison in Michigan, inmates tear office furniture apart. But the warden won't call out the National Guard. That's because the inmates are only doing their jobs — recycling obsolete and broken furniture. They probably never heard of "cradle-to-cradle" design, but so-called C2C might be nothing less than a blueprint for preventing ecological disaster.

A world without birds. C2C isn't new. It dates back to at least 1962 and Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, which envisions a world without birds, the result of manmade chemicals such as DDT. It took about 10 years before the U.S. and Germany banned DDT. The environmental movement added toxic waste and pollution to the vanishing wilderness and diminishing resources as areas for concern.

Upcycling. A key step in the cradleto-cradle protocol involves "upcycling," in which products can be easily disassembled, sorted, and returned to the manufacturing stream without a loss in value to the ingredients. The inefficient process of recycling typically involves a loss of value. This loss of value occurs in what is called an "open-loop" cycle. The processing of Styrofoam packaging into park benches involves such a loss: when a park bench reaches the end of its useful life it has less value (for making new products) than did the original packaging material. It can't be remade into Styrofoam packaging and will most likely end up in a landfill. Upcycling occurs in "closed-loop" cycles in which it is theoretically possible to produce an unlimited number of products from the same resources.

Designing from nature. William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a German chemist, cowrote the movement's handbook, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, in which they say industry could learn much from the cherry tree.

McDonough and Braungart use a tree to show how industry must operate if it is to stop squandering nonrenewable resources and wrecking the environment: The cherry tree, say the authors, litters the ground with thousands of blossoms in the process of producing fruit and replacing itself. But it produces blossoms and fruit without depleting the environment. This, in a nutshell, is what C2C is all about: producing goods and services without the destructive extraction and downcycling (reduction of a material's value over time) of resources.

Cradle to grave. McDonough and Braungart are not espousing a return to the Stone Age. Rather, they see a world in which industry provides even greater abundance for man, while assuring the health of the ecosystem and eliminating waste. To better understand the cradleto-cradle system, consider the cradleto-grave designs that define modern manufacturing.

Herman Miller's "Mirra" office chair

"By some estimates more than 90% of the materials extracted for the production of durable goods in the U.S. become waste almost immediately," say the authors. And the products themselves seldom don't last much longer. In general, the disposed item represents only 5% of the raw materials consumed in its production and transportation: The item we toss in the landfill is only 1/20th of total wasted resources.

Historically, industrial problem solving meant applying engineering strategies to make wasteful or hazardous processes more sustainable. The C2C system holds that maintaining a fundamentally flawed system only guarantees a decline in quality of life — a leveraging of the Earth's future.

The outdated concept of environmentalsustainability focuses on reducing environmental damage. From an engineering perspective, sustainability too often means making industrial processes cleaner and more efficient while ensuring economic growth. This kind of efficiency may reduce consumption and pollution in the short term, but it fails to repair fundamental design flaws. It addresses symptoms, not causes. Environmental sustainability fails to eliminate waste.

All the recyclable components of a disassembled chair.

C2C design represents a paradigm shift, say McDonough and Braungart, abolishing a system that depends on toxic, one-way cradle-to-grave material flows. In a cradle-to-cradle system, powered by renewable energy (solar and wind), materials would flow in safe, regenerative closed-loop cycles. These closed-loop cycles involve either technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients are materials such as steel and aluminum, which do not biodegrade. Biological nutrients biodegrade.

The Green House. When office furniture-maker Herman Miller, Zeeland, Mich., decided to build a "green" factory, it chose McDonough's firm, William McDonough & Partners, Charlottesville, Va. The goal was to design a workplace where workers would feel less cut off from nature. For about 10% more than the cost of a standard prefabricated-metal factory building, the architects delivered: a factory with a treelined, daylit interior "street;" work stations illuminated by skylights; a manufacturing floor with views of both the indoor street and the outdoors; and a water-treatment system that cleans storm water and wastewater by channeling it through wetlands before discharging into the local river. The company even credits a portion of recent productivity gains to the factory's ability to satisfy the employees' love of nature. The Herman Miller factory represents only the beginnings of eco-effective design, but it is a good example of the benefits that go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment.