Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Waste = Food

We were inspired by an article we came across about those programs you see in almost every hotel nowadays, the “don’t change your linen every day” programs, to think about how negative a lot of the green messages are out there. “Reduce”, “Decrease” and “Stop” are leading verbs that are used when talking about environmental action. This has the psychological effect of shaming people into behavioral change, which doesn’t work. As we can plainly see.

One of the reasons we value the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) message, and think it can work better, is that it is a positive message; “Create positive waste” is the rallying cry. This rubs a lot of people up the wrong way, because they automatically associate waste with garbage clogging up landfills. But nature creates waste in every yearly cycle: the trees drop first their flowers and then their leaves on the ground. And we don’t see Greenpeace or other environmental organizations protesting in forests about all the tree waste! That is because tree waste becomes compost to fertilize future plant growth.

Positive technological waste can follow the same pattern: waste is created in a technological cycle, but it is channeled back into the production cycle by the total recycling of that waste into new products.

Desso, a global flooring solutions company, and one of the “poster children” of Cradle to Cradle products and processes, has the goal of 100% recycling of its carpet waste back into carpet. It will never stop creating waste, but it will achieve total closed loop processes, where all waste is food.

The article on the hotel programs paraphrased a comment made by William McDonough, co-founder of the Cradle to Cradle methodology, on how to turn a negative program, focused on “reducing linen washing” (subtext: “you’re wasting resources just by staying here and we don’t want you”), into a positive Cradle to Cradle message: “feel good about staying here, because we have environmental programs in place that use renewable energy, rainwater capture systems and innovative water treatment systems, which means you are contributing to the environment by staying here, using the linen and taking long hot showers to your heart’s content.”

Now that’s a hotel WE would stay at. And we believe many people would feel the same.