How is Sustainable Development in Practice

One of the largest barriers to sustainable development today, is the lack of communication between people with different expertise such as biologists and engineers.  Designers cannot design sustainable systems without the help of scientists or someone with a firm understanding about natural designs.  Biomimicry is the term used to describe these systems that mimic nature in their designs and functions.  These designs have proven to reduce the amount of harmful chemicals, heavy metals and plastic we use.  Natural design has been retained in natural systems for thousands of years, making these designs resilient.  Could we design systems that could “heal themselves” like natural systems do?  Often our engineered designs require engineering the environment they work in which is costly and energy inefficient.

I came across this TED talk recently about biomimicry by Janine Benyus.  Janine is an author and a scientist who has come to specialise in the field of biomimicry.  She works on integrating the natural methods of design into human design to minimise the use of environmentally harmful products and is an active participant in the Biomimicry Guild.   

“Life conduces the conditions conducsive to life.” This was the last slide Janine presented during her TED talk.  I believe this was planned out as one of her last slides on purpose so that if the viewer learned anything in her TED talk about biomimicry and the nature of things they would take home this message.  I certainly did.  Life is continually giving back so that life can go on. 

A World with NO Waste... seems impossible, but it’s not.

The Earth has created this perfect “garbage to gold” philosophy where all the wastes produced by living organisms are recycled back into the soil, the water or the air for reuse by other organisms.  This creates a world of no waste because the waste becomes a resource.  This isn’t a huge stretch for humans, but it is very obvious that this isn’t the current human condition. I’m talking about the many synthetic compounds we produce. When they become waste, they do not have a mutualistic relationship with other organisms to be used as a resource and our accumulating on our globe. 

The greatest example of this lack of mutualism is the “toilet that won’t flush” filled with plastics in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  This is not sustainable and plastic was never created with the intention of degrading.  If we can begin to focus on turning our waste into resources and creating products so that their waste products are resources for us or other organisms the world will begin to shift to becoming more sustainable. 

A current example of creating products for human use while using their waste products as a resources for other organisms is the idea of making plastic out of mushrooms.  This is a fascinating TED talk by Eben Bayer creator of Ecovative Design's MycoBond on the use of mushrooms in making a bio-plastic.  These are disposable plastics.  His team has focused on replacing Styrofoam packaging and plastics which contributes 25% of our landfills.  The bio-plastics his team creates uses mycelium found in mushrooms, which are nature’s janitors.

I hope these videos have shown you some glimpses into the current work that is going on to create a world where there is NO waste.  It is possible and its happening.