Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus (©1997 by Janine M. Benyus).

If anybody’s growing biomass, it’s us. To keep our system from collapsing on itself, industrial ecologists are attempting to build a “no-waste economy”. Instead of a linear production system, which binges on virgin raw materials and spews out unusable waste, they envision a web of closed loops in which a minimum of raw materials comes in the door, and very little waste escapes. The first examples of this no-waste economy are collections of companies clustered in an ecopark and connected in a food chain, with each firm’s waste gong next door to become the other firm’s raw material or fuel.

In Denmark, the town of Kalundborg has the world’s most elaborate prototype of an ecopark. Four companies are co-located , and all of them are linked, dependent on one another for resources or energy. The Asnaesverket Power Company pipes some of its waste steam to power the engines of two companies: the Statoil Refinery and Novo Nordisk (a pharmaceutical plant). Another pipeline delivers the remaining waste steam to heat thirty-five hundred homes in the town, eliminating the need for oil furnaces. The power plant also delivers its cooling water, now toasty warm, to fifty-seven ponds’ worth of fish. The fish revel in the warm water, and the fish farm produces 250 tons of sea trout and turbot each year.

Waste steam from the power company is used by Novo Nordisk to heat the fermentation tanks that produce insulin and enzymes. This process in turn creates 700,000 tons of nitrogen-rich slurry a year, which used to be dumped into the fjord. Now, Novo bequeaths it free to nearby farmers—a pipeline delivers the fertilizer to the growing plants, which are in turn harvested to feed the bacteria in the fermentation tanks.

Meanwhile, back at the Statiol Refinery, waste gas that used to go up a smokestack is now purified. Some is used internally as fuel, some is piped to the power company, and the rest goes to Gyproc, the wallboard maker next door. The sulfur squeezed from the gas during purification is loaded onto trucks and sent to Kemira, a company that produces sulfuric acid. The power company also squeezes sulfur from its emissions, but converts most of it to calcium sulfate (industrial gypsum), which it sells to Gyproc for wallboard.

Although Kalundborg is a cozy co-location, industries need not be geographically close to operate in a food web as long as they are connected by a mutual desire to use waste. Already, some companies are designing their processes so that any waste that falls on the production-room floor is valuable and can be used by someone else. In their game of “designed offal”, a process with lots of waste, as long as it’s “wanted waste”, may be better than one with a small amount of waste that must be landfilled or burned. As author Daniel Chiras says, more companies are recognizing that “technologies that produce by-products society cannot absorb are essentially failed technologies.”

So far, we’ve talked about recycling within a circle of companies. But what happens when a product leaves the manufacturer and passes to the consumer and finally to the trash can? Right now, a product visits one of two fates at the end of its useful life. It can be buried in a landfill or incinerated, or it can be recaptured through recycling or reuse.

Traditionally, manufactures haven’t had to worry about what happens to a product after it leaves their gates. But that is starting to change, thanks to laws now in the wings in Europe (and headed for the United States) that will require companies to take back their durable goods such as refrigerators, washers, and cars at the end of their useful lives. In Germany, the take-back laws start with the initial sale. Companies must take back all their packaging or hire middlemen to do the recycling. Take-back laws mean that manufacturers must now say, “We recycle our products and pack-aging.”

When the onus shifts in this way, it’s suddenly in the company’s best interest to design a product that will either last a long time or come apart easily for recycling or reuse. Refrigerators and cars will be assembled using easy-open snaps instead of glued-together joints, and for recyclability, each part will be made of one material instead of twenty. Even simple things, like the snack bags for potato chips, will be streamlined. Today’s bags, which have nine thin layers made of seven different materials, will no doubt be replaced by one material that can preserve freshness and can easily be remade into new bag.