Why so much bad news
Most of the numbers on this site are going the wrong way. We show them because they are true - and because they make the case that something has to change. A counter of forest lost or species in decline is meant to be uncomfortable.
The danger of discomfort is that it can harden into despair, and despair is a comfortable place to stop. If nothing can be done, nothing is asked of us.
What is going right
A good deal can be done, and some of it already has been. The hole in the ozone layer is still closing because the world agreed to stop making the chemicals that caused it, in the Montreal Protocol. Child deaths fell from a massive 13 million per year in 1990 to 4.9 million in 2024, as infections stopped killing young children at the rate they once did. This is a great achievement, even if it still leaves 3,984,063 children who have died before their fifth birthday so far this year. Solar power is also now covering most of the growth in the world’s electricity demand, even if it hasn’t yet pushed coal out. As we collect more good news, you can read about them in the Hope section.
Take, make, throw away
Most of what we buy travels the same short line. Raw materials are dug up or cut down, made into a product, shipped, used for a while and thrown away. Designers call this cradle to grave, and the grave is a landfill or an incinerator.
That line has grown enormously. The world now takes about 106 billion tonnes of materials out of the ground every year, more than three times as much as in 1970. That is about 39 kilos for every person on Earth, every day, and the UN’s International Resource Panel expects it to rise another 60% by 2060.
Very little of it comes back. Only 6.9% of the materials going into the world economy are recycled or reused, and that share is shrinking. Recycling is growing, but new extraction is growing faster.
The trouble with doing less harm
Most environmental effort goes into making that line more efficient, with less energy and waste per product and fewer emissions per kilometre driven. The jargon for it is eco-efficiency. It matters, and it has achieved a lot. But a factory that does less harm is still doing harm, and the damage carries on - just a bit more slowly.
In their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle, the American architect William McDonough and the German chemist Michael Braungart put it far more bluntly:
“Relying on eco-efficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.”
— William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 2002
Even recycling, as it is usually done, tends to be what they called downcycling. A soda or drinks can is made from two different aluminium alloys, and melting them together gives a weaker metal than either. Mixed plastics come back as park benches and speed bumps, which is one more stop on the way to the dump, albeit durable and potentially long-lasting. Even so, we are still just “kicking the can down the road”.
In nature, waste is food
Nature does it differently. A cherry tree makes thousands of blossoms, far more than it needs to grow new trees, and nobody calls it wasteful, because the fallen blossoms feed the soil that the tree stands in. What one organism leaves behind, another one eats.
From this observation springs the idea that everything we make should belong to one of two cycles. Biological materials, like natural fibres or packaging made to rot, should be safe to return to the soil and feed it. Technical materials, like metals and most plastics, should be designed to be taken apart and made into new products at the same quality, again and again. The trouble starts when the two are glued or blended together so that neither can be recovered, which is how a great many everyday products are made.
Two more ideas complete the picture. Things should be made with the energy the sun delivers today, as sunlight and wind, rather than with the ancient sunlight stored in coal and oil. And they should be designed for the place they end up in, its climate, people and wildlife, instead of one solution stamped out everywhere.
Put together, it is a different goal for design. What about a building that, like a tree, makes more energy than it uses and cleans the water that runs through it? Or a car whose exhaust is cleaner than the air it takes in? McDonough has described the aim like this:
“Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed.”
— William McDonough
Where waste already becomes food
Today the idea usually goes by a broader name, the circular economy, and you can find it working in factories, in buildings and in law.
In the Danish town of Kalundborg, companies have been passing their leftovers to each other since the early 1970s. Surplus steam from the power station heats homes and runs the factories next door, and the gypsum left over from cleaning its smoke goes into plasterboard. One company’s waste has become another’s raw material, because that turned out to be cheaper for both.
Buildings can work more like living things too. When Ford rebuilt its historic River Rouge truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan, in the early 2000s, it covered the roof in 10.4 acres of sedum, a low, hardy plant, making it one of the largest living roofs in the world. The roof soaks up as much as 4 million gallons of rainwater a year that would otherwise pour off the factory into the Rouge River.
Some materials already go round almost forever. Steel and aluminium can be melted down and made into new products again and again, and recycling aluminium takes around a twentieth of the energy needed to make it from ore. The difficulty is keeping them clean of everything else on the way.
Made to last, and made to come back
The same thinking is changing products. Fairphone sells a smartphone whose owner can swap the battery or the screen with a screwdriver. The EU has passed a right-to-repair law that obliges makers to repair some products after the warranty runs out, and its new ecodesign rules stop large companies from destroying unsold clothes and shoes.
Thousands of products, from carpets and office chairs to building materials, now carry the Cradle to Cradle Certified label, run by an independent non-profit. It checks whether the materials are safe, whether the product can go round again, and how making it affects the climate, water, soil and the people who do the work. For how to tell a company that takes this seriously from one that only says so, see Support green companies.
Better is not enough on its own
There is an honest objection to all this, and we think it is right. Better materials help little if we keep using ever more of them. The share of materials that goes round again is falling even as recycling grows, because so much more new material is dug up every year.
It is tempting to believe we could keep consuming as much as we like, as long as everything were designed well. A perfectly recyclable phone replaced every year still takes energy, mining and labour to make. Designing things better and needing fewer of them work together. The second is harder, because it is a question about how we live.
Optimism that asks something of all of us
Our optimism comes with a condition. Or a hope for change. The challenges we face, as illustrated on this site, can all be solved if enough of us care. And caring is something we can all grow. It comes from loving our world and nature enough to want to keep it - and from living in a way that we don’t have to look away from.
