Beyond sustainability: Cradle-to-cradle business innovation and improvement zones in NW Europe

Abstract

'Sustainability' has defined the approach towards dealing with resource deprivation and climate change over the past three decades, promoting 'less bad' strategies that aim to mitigate damage. Cradle-to-Cradle (C2C) offers an alternative approach that focuses on doing 'good' by promoting continuous loops, reliance on current solar income, and diversity. It is argued that this philosophy offers the best opportunity to make a big beneficial footprint on this planet rather than just reducing the damage being done. Whilst this approach has seen some application in various products including the delivery of some buildings where it has positively and significantly impacted the triple bottom line, it is yet to be scaled up for wider application to whole sites. It is against this background that the C2C BIZZ project is being funded by the European Commission as part of the INTERREG IVB North-West Europe (NWE) Programme to explore the possibilities of wide scale application of C2C using a network of business sites across NWE. This paper provides some insight into the contents of this project, and argues that this project will allow for the formation of a virtual transnational C2C demonstration business site that will provide a blueprint for all future C2C applications in the built environment in NWE through the development of a suite of C2C tools. © 2012 WIT Press.