Listening to William McDonough talk is an inspiring experience.
McDonough has a simple very clear thought. Our industrial world does not work like nature. Take the humble tree. A tree is a product that exists in nature and has many useful functions. It recycles CO2 from the air, produces nutrients and grows leaves. It provides shade and a windbreak for more delicate plants, when fall comes it deposits more nutrients onto the ground around it than it needs, thus enriching the environment where it exists.
Not so for man-made products. Take for example the much heralded iPod. It delivers the ability to have all your music with you wherever you go, but it cannot provide its own energy and what happens at the end of the products useful life? A life cut short by our way of progressing technology in small incremental steps. And after you have seen a new version come out (note, not when it no longer works!) useless landfill material, here we come!
A tree is arguably a perfect piece of technology, perfect in the way that it operates as well as the way that it fits into its larger eco system. Whereas man-made objects certainly are not perfec, they are made from technologies and materials that are constantly evolving and improving which most often translates into becoming more powerful.
This is one of the most profound issues we face on the road to sustainability. The Universe has an overall design. Everything has its place and a defined dependent function. Change is glacial, often taking centuries, so the whole system can adapt.
McDonough refers to this part of our world as the bio-sphere. The man made part is referred to as the techno-sphere. The characteristics of these 2 systems are vastly different.
Essentially the techno-sphere is very much temporary, rapidly changing and developing, without any grand plan or roadmap. There is no one creator of this system, but rather millions of creators, often working with little or no regard for what others are doing. As this system evolves, that isolationist thinking is changing as we can witness from the world of electronics, global banking or any other system that has evolved to a global level. Who actually knows where we are going? Certainly if they do, they are not in charge or regulating the development of the techno-sphere at all. The techno-sphere is characterized by the fact that there is no plan to complete the cycle. Products in this system are produced, but there is no plan for what becomes of them after their useful life. The cycle is only half completed!
Capitalism is a system built on the principle of making new value efficiently, not sustaining or nurturing or preserving it. That seems to need another way of thinking to achieve.
A new economic system needs to be developed. One which says that you are responsible for ensuring that what you produce has a plan. A cycle that ensures that it returns to useful raw material or reuse at the end of its useful life and that instead of producing waste, you produce the raw materials for a new process.
How do we think of this? Does a tree get any value from the waste it produces? Sure. The nutrients go back to the soil and help as food for the tree as well as other plants. Does the tree get paid for this food production? Not directly. This is where capitalism fails us. If there is no value to be made (in the form of revenue that exceeds cost) then it will not be taken up as an activity.
The central question to ask in moving towards sustainability is how we can profit from completing the cycle from raw material to raw material instead of waste.
The carpet industry may be able to offer the best insight so far. The industry consolidated through the last century and now consists of only a few players. That means that when one of the participants, Interface, took the initiative to become more sustainable through the commitment of its leader, it forced the other players in the industry to follow suit or be seen as the bad guys in the eyes of the consumer.
Most carpets today are thrown out as building rubble at the end of their life. This means that the carpet industry needs to get new virgin plastic material for every ounce of new carpet that it makes. Where the industry is rapidly moving towards is the position of recycling all of the old carpet and only adding the material that represents the growth of the industry (so probably in the order of 5-10% instead of 100% new material. In other words the industry is organizing itself for collection of old carpet as food (much like fallen leaves from a tree) instead of letting it go as waste. Why is this important? Plastic is an oil based material, as the price of the diminishing resource of oil rises so too does the cost of plastic. Virgin plastic that is! Over time this industry will have become 80-90% more efficient in its use of new plastic material! That is a stunning thought and a proof point that such a change of thinking from waste to food is achievable.
Take this analogy a step further. See raw material as a limited resource instead of a phone call away and it becomes clear that there is an absolute advantage in becoming the one who collects all the raw material in the first place. Say you are a 10% competitor in the carpet industry. What happens to your revenue and power when you become the one to collect and recycle and resell or hold onto 90% of the raw material? Nothing today. But in a few years from now when the limited nature and continuously rising price of new virgin material starts to hurt?
We live in interesting times. We are starting to rethink our industrial complex. It is like a new land grab, gold rush or colonization phase in history. As we shift our thinking from waste to raw material, so we have the opportunity to shift the relative positions of power.
Are you thinking about how you can profit from the waste side of the cycle? Green LLC can help you to think through strategies to do this as well as help you to work on the innovations that are invariably needed to make these strategies possible.