I like the material of this book---both the content and the material the pages were made of. The entire book is made of PET. As Dave said, you can read it in the tub. I never took advantage of that property.
The book is made out of PET to demonstrate a new idea in design (the design of everything---products, houses, cars, rugs, etc.) where the item when "used up" is not "thrown away" or downcycled (the authors' replacement term for recycling since most products that are recycled do not become products of the same quality of the original since the materials being recycled degrade on each cycle), but is instead completely reused in the same product it appeared in originally. Or the material becomes a "technical nutrient"---a material that took a lot of time and energy to extract originally and therefor is valuable if it can be maintained. With most current materials this is not possible due to chemicals used in processing. It turns out not to be very good for one to wear a shirt made out of old plastic bottles due to the chemicals used in bottle making---they were never intended to be worn against the skin.
The authors propose that designers consider this as they come up with product and choose materials and processes that are appropriate for long-term reuse. I like this idea, but I see it as very difficult to actually change, as even when pilot tests are run in large companies and prove these ideas out, the inertia of the management chain makes it very disheartening to think about.
The book is well written and easy to read. I like the brightness of the PET pages as well. The biggest fault I see with the book is that it doesn't give much of a call to action. Nothing really tells me what I can do as a consumer to improve the situation.
7/10
RE "...to improve the situation." True...each community offers different alternatives, some of which are wholly unsatisfactory -- as when a small city/suburban municipality requires recycling, and the separation of those items into different containers to be collected, but then turns around and trashes it all in the same field of broken dreams because there is no economical force available to forward the bulk or any portion of it that it might then be recycled in any of those ways that the average person can think of when they have been told for so long that x is made into y...and so forth. This is largely the case with too too much paper/cardboard, for instance, and is so common that one finds that even some municipal agents "think" things are being forwarded along an imagined pipeline until the local landfill agents (or press/media) lift up a problem with shrinking space owing to ... What? ... too much paper/cardboard being dumped by those who collect it on behalf of the municipality (that also requires recycling/separation). Nutz.
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