Enjoyed the lecture – McDonough has a very academic sense of humour. Seemingly he designed the ‘first solar heated house in Ireland’. Anyone know if this is true, and where is this famous house (what’s the betting its in Leitrm?). Have ordered Cradle to Cradle to learn more about his approaches to sustainable design and architecture.

I got the Cradle to Cradle book and read it – very interesting if a bit long-winded. The key point is that we should not be ‘recycling’ in the accepted sense, rather that we should make use of materials in such a way as they are not degraded and can then re-enter the manufacturing system as ‘technical nutrients’, in the same way that ‘nature’ reuses nutrients (eg through composting processes). It certainly makes packaging such as paper fused to aluminium (as in many juice cartons) look very inefficient. Interestingly the C2C book itself is not made of paper but of a polymer that allows you 1) to recycle it for resuse as a plastic and 2) read it in the bath (didn’t test this out). The result is an attractive and very durable book, but it is also on the heavy side and this probably leads to negative impacts in terms of distribution effects. But overall, a book well worth reading, I’d say.