"Consider the cherry tree. It makes thousands of blossoms just so that another tree might germinate, take root, and grow. After falling to the ground, the blossoms return to the soil and become nutrients for the surrounding environment. Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem. "Waste equals food"—the first principle of the Next Industrial Revolution.
"Human industry, on the other hand, is severely limited. It follows a one-way, cradle-to-grave manufacturing line in which things are created and eventually discarded, usually in an incinerator or a landfill. The waste from human industry is not 'food' at all. In fact, it is often poison.
"There is an alternative—one that will allow both business and nature to be fecund and productive."
- William McDonough
The
Next Industrial Revolution
n the
spring of 1999, Ford Motor Company CEO, William Clay Ford, Jr. '79, faced
a critical decision: Close the aging Rouge River Plant—the Company's
former flagship—and move manufacturing out of Dearborn, Michigan? Or
stay? Complicating the decision was a mandate by the Clean Water Act requiring
Ford to install at the site storm water reclamation systems to reduce toxic
runoff, a cost of some $48 million. This would have to be done whether Rouge
was shut down or not.
n deciding
to stay, Ford made a commitment as bold and visionary as his great-grandfather
Henry's decision to build Rouge in the first place.
Henry and Edsel Ford study a model of the Rouge River Plant
"Henry Ford was the father of the assembly line. We want William Clay Ford to be the father of the disassembly line."
- William McDonough
n June
16, 2003, Ford Motor Company will celebrate its 100th anniversary. This occasion
will coincide with the completion of Phase One of the Rouge River Plant Rehabilitation,
a 20-year, $2 billion redesign, the first fruits of Ford's recommitment to
Dearborn. What Ford and his lead architect, William McDonough, will unveil
on this day—to the public, the press, and, not least, to shareholders—is
the transformation of an environmental and financial catastrophe into "the
model of twenty-first century manufacturing." The new Rouge Plant will establish
new standards for material flow, waste reduction, and other lean manufacturing
processes. And it will celebrate a partnership between Ford and McDonough
that earlier this month on January 18, 2003, introduced the world's first
recyclable car. More on this in a moment.
Rouge River Plant, 1952
"This is not environmental philanthropy."
- Bill Ford
he centerpiece
at Rouge includes a new 600,000 square-foot assembly plant, featuring skylights
to brighten the factory floor and a "flexible" assembly system. Ford will
now be able to build nine different vehicle models on the same assembly platforms,
allowing quick response to changing markets, potentially saving millions in
replatforming costs.
he plant's
most pungent feature is its "living roof"—a full 10.4 acres of sedum,
whose unique absorption properties provides natural storm water management.
Gutters are unnecessary; the plant cover filters rainfall and snowfall; and
the roof will never need painting. Sedum also insulates.
he parking
areas are a second component of the water system, made with a specially-fine
permeable asphalt. The contoured ground is the third component, engineered
in swales that force runoff through plant-based filtration to remove contaminants.
According to the architects, storm water returning to the Rouge River should
meet Clean Water Act standards. Water may take months to be naturally purified
and recycled, but the system works. And it cost just $13 million. Compared
to what Ford had intended to spend originally—on three chemical treatment
plants and extensive excavation to install concrete pipes—this approach
seems more than sensible. And these same features will restore habitat to
the site, with orchards, a forest, and natural watercourses.
"The birds flying over the Rouge will look down
and say, oh, it's our people, they're back."- William McDonough
hat
kind of practitioner did Bill Ford hire to help save Rouge?
illiam
McDonough was relatively well-known by the time Ford picked him, having designed
several ecologically sensible buildings around the country. At the corporate
campus for Gap, Inc., in San Bruno, California, McDonough had the roofs insulated
with six inches of soil and planted with native grasses and wildflowers. For
the environmental studies department at Oberlin College in Ohio, McDonough's
solar- and geothermal-powered building scheme generates more energy than it
uses. And in nearby Holland, Michigan, McDonough designed an office and furniture
manufacturing facility for Herman Miller, Inc., which incorporates earth berms
that insulate and a newly created landscape of wetlands that purify storm
water runoff.
hat
was also known about McDonough—which made Bill Ford's decision that much
more controversial—was his heretical enviromental
philosophy, which combines equal parts of Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader. He
would like to change the way you, I, and corporate executives think about
everything— transportation, energy use, communications, synthetic materials,
and even nature itself. He's prone to make grand provocative statements, like
"If growth doesn't follow nature's laws, we call it bad. If growth is for
the sake of itself, it's like cancer." "Where in the Bill of Rights does
it give an individual, a community, or a company the right to pollute? It
doesn't!" "The two questions we're asking as designers now are:
1) How do we love all the children of all species for all time? And 2) When
do we become indigenous people again?"
Yet along with his evangelical ardor, McDonough understands the culture of business. He has an uncanny knack of talking about the most radical environmental principles using the bottom-line language of the boardroom. Employing the simplistic graphics of a PowerPoint presentation, McDonough plots his philosophy in a triangle (and calls it "the Fractal Ecology of Sustaining Design"), with economic returns (equity), social good (economy), and environmental benefits (ecology) at the corners. He explains that there need not be a trade-off of one for the other, that all three "indicators" can be maximized through creative architecture and design. What's most impressive is that people are listening. Not only did he make a believer in Bill Ford, several other top executives—at Nike, DuPont, British Petroleum, Steelcase, and the world's largest producer of chemicals, BASF—are becoming convinced that manufacturing can coexist with environmentalism and still remain sound business.
utside
the boardroom, McDonough's speech is more pointed, less conciliatory. For
instance, when he talks about regulations, he's practically bitter about what
they represent. Far from being a free market libertarian, however, McDonough
feels that regulations are emblematic of a culture tolerant of its own destruction.
"Regulations are signals of design failure."
- William McDonough
"hen
I say that regulations are signals of design failure," McDonough says, "my
emphasis is 'signals.' They're signaling to us that something is fatally wrong.
They're signaling to us that we have a right to be polluters, as long as we
pollute within certain limits. Less bad is not good. Our culture has, in a
strange way, adopted a protocol which essentially presumes the right to pollute
and destroy."
"
ompanies
will say, 'I'm meeting the regulations. I'm recycling. I have recycled content
in my building.' Well, even if you look at the current lead standards for
U.S. construction, or the current emissions standards for U.S. manufacturing,
they're really a nightmare. They allow polluters to continue polluting. The
regulations that we have for industry are really an invitation to pollute."
"e
need to change the fundamental fabric of our manufacturing and building schemes.
We need to design them for disassembly and adaptive reuse—inherent in
their design—so that no building, no machine, no product, will ever remain
a heap of toxic junk in a landfill. And that's what we're trying to do at
Rouge."
The Rouge makes oxygen. How many buildings you know have made oxygen lately?
- William McDonough
cDonough's
book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point
Press, 2002), written with his business partner, German industrial chemist
and former Greenpeace activist Michael Braungart, proposes a new design agenda:
not that we have to make less stuff; we just have to make it differently.
Their enterprise, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, is dedicated to helping
companies implement "eco-effective" commerce strategies.
cDonough
and Braungart's world would have two kinds of products: The first are made
of "biological nutrients," like corn- and soy-based foams and fibers, which
are completely biodegradable. Sneakers wearing thin? Throw them in the compost.
Carpet seen better days? Eat it for dinner. (They're not kidding; read on.)
he
second kinds of products are made of "technical nutrients," plastics, polymers,
metals, and glass, made so they are endlessly reusable. McDonough reminds
us that plastic water bottles and polyester shirts contain small amounts of
antimony, a heavy metal that causes cancer. The rubber soles in a pair of
shoes contain lead. And all our electronic appliances—from TVs to cars—contain
chemicals that cannot be recycled. What happens after we throw them away?
These are the "wrong kinds of nutrients," McDonough says, "because they would
contaminate the material cycles." McDonough and Braungart's antidote is to
work closely with major manufacturers to develop new eco-effective products
using biological and technical nutrients, and to help make them commercially
viable. For example, MBDC is working with Nike to make sneakers free of VOCs
and PVCs (polyvinyl chlorides) that can biodegrade safely into soil. The company
recently developed a carpet with Shaw Carpets made of a new isotope of nylon,
nylon-6, that's "infinitely recyclable." And they've created a "pure technical
ingredient" fabric with Design-Tex that, McDonough says, is so free of toxins,
it's edible. Homer Simpson, beware.
he most
glamorous, if not the most exciting, proposition came in an announcement in
early January at the 2003 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
"The company's Centennial offers us a unique opportunity to reflect on our many past accomplishments. But it also challenges us to look ahead and create a vision of continuing success. Model U is an exploration of that future vision."
- Bill Ford
The Model T of the Twenty-first Century
ou can
have it in any color you want, as long as it's green. In design and materials,
the Model U comes very close to the cradle-to-cradle ideal set forth by the
McDonough-Braungart agenda. It's made of materials that can be in continuous
life-cycles, both technical and biological, and it's a hybrid electric- and
hydrogen-powered engine, using internal combustion rather than a fuel cell.
t performs
as well a gasoline-fueled engine—45 miles per gallon. Yet because there
are no carbon atoms in hydrogen, combustion produces no hydrocarbon or carbon-dioxide
emissions. It's not emission-free, however, producing water vapor and nitrous
oxides, yet these are at very low levels and Ford's product literature suggests
that catalyst research may soon reduce emissions to "near-zero."
on't
try to eat the body of the car—it's made out of aluminum. But with a
shake of salt and some butter you might enjoy the "canvas" roof and floor
mats, which are made by Cargill Dow from a corn-based biopolymer called polylactide.
The seats and tailgate are processed from soy-based foams and plastics. The
dash, steering wheel, headrests, armrests, and door trim are all eco-effective
polyesters from Milliken and Co.—an "infinitely recyclable" technical
nutrient. Even the tires, made of rubber, use corn-based fillers as a partial
substitute for carbon black. And I've read they're lighter and offer lower
rolling resistance, which improves fuel economy and traction in wet weather.
hat
links the Model U genetically to its alphabetical predecessor is that it's
designed for mass production. Yet the one major difference from the Model
T is U's modular, "slot-panel" design, which gives consumers a wide variety
of ways to customize it. I hear the jingle now: "U's can make it anyway you
want."
he Model
U is the result of a partnership struck among Ford's Research and Advanced
Engineering, Ford's Brand Imaging Group, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry,
British Petroleum, and a host of technology suppliers. Its rollout won't be
for many years, but it received considerable acclaim at the Auto Show and
Ford seems serious in its commitment to bringing the Model U to market as
the first true cradle to cradle vehicle.
he most
emotional part of Ford's Centennial, certainly for the Company, its employees,
and the union, is that it will take place in Dearborn, its historic home,
where founder Henry Ford launched the American industrial revolution. That
this celebration will transpire in sight of a river that's gradually coming
to life again, and that it inaugurates a new kind of manufacturing in a new
kind of industrial facility, suggests that Ford and McDonough's claim might
indeed be valid that the next industrial revolution has begun.
All of the photographs above were provided courtesy of Ford Motor Company.
Eric Lubell '76 is the editor of The Independent.