This is the third in a seven-part series on what author Gregory Unruh calls the
‘Biosphere Rules.’ Read parts
one
and
two.
In the previous installment, we discussed Biosphere Rule #1 — Materials
Parsimony,
which is about limiting the types of materials used in your products. Once you
have your pallet of carefully selected parsimonious materials, your next task is
to cycle those materials through repeated, high-value uses, which is the focus
of Biosphere Rule # 2 — Value Cycling.
The biosphere has been value cycling its parsimonious materials pallet for
billions of years. The carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) in
your body today was once found in our ancient human ancestors, in prehistoric
dinosaurs and even the first cyanobacteria that marked the start of life on
earth. The truth is, you are made of recycled stardust that came out of the Big
Bang and the subsequent stellar explosions that forged the universe’s
fundamental elements. Matter in the universe is just transformed over and over
again, a fact that is replicated by life in the biosphere. This fundamental
understanding, however, has not been incorporated into the way we have built
businesses in our industrial world.
The model we use to teach MBAs about production is the value
chain. It's been very
successful in helping business people to understand the value-adding steps
needed to produce a product. But there's a problem: It imagines a linear world
in which materials can be constantly pushed through an assembly line with no
consequence. Its predicated on a “sell it and forget it” ideology. Of course,
sustainability problems arise because value chains are embedded here on planet
earth. Nothing going through a value chain disappears. It all ultimately ends up
as waste, pollution and contamination.
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The biosphere does not operate in a “sell it and forget it” value chain. It
functions on a Value Cycle, which is the constant cycling of enduring
materials from one high-value use to another. It is a cycle that has operated
continuously for billions of years, so we know the model works.
The way nature cycles materials (along with their embedded energy and
information) through the biosphere is modeled by ecologists as the Trophic
Pyramid (see figure below). At the base of the pyramid are primary producers
— autotrophic plants that capture the sun’s energy and use it to structure CHON
into plant biomass. The next level of the pyramid is occupied by primary
consumer herbivores, such as cows and deer, that feed on plants. The upper
reaches of the pyramid are inhabited by secondary consumer predators, such as
wolves and sharks, that feed on primary consumers.
Circular economists can envision an analogous Product Pyramid for building value
cycles. At the base of the pyramid is the materials level, where we take
natural capital and refine it into the materials we use to build products. The
next level would be the component level, which are the parts and subsystems of
a larger product — as an electric motor is part of an electric vehicle. Then the
fully integrated product would be the top level, the product level, which
could be a fully assembled Tesla. The product pyramid then presents
opportunities for value-cycling strategies and each of these different levels.
At the highest product level, we can engage in Epicycling — the cycling of
entire products from user to user, from use to use. This is something we also
see in the biosphere, as when a hermit crab reuses a snail’s discarded shell. As
the crab grows, it will jettison a shell that has become too small and find a
larger one to occupy. Here the biosphere maximizes the productivity of the
investment made in producing the original shell by cycling it from one user to
the next.
This, of course, happens in our economy whenever a construction company rents a
crane or you rent a moving van. Epicycling like this optimizes asset
productivity. But we are seeing an innovative boom in Epicycling models, thanks
to information technology and the rise of the sharing economy. The potential
gains can be jaw-dropping. Take your car: It's estimated that the typical
automobile is parked upwards of 90 percent of the time, leaving the investment
in materials, energy and information sitting idle; creating no value.
What’s true for cars is true for most items; just think about what’s in your
garage or lawn shed. Innovations in the sharing
economy
are finding ways to unlock those languishing assets. Sharing-economy platforms
such as Uber, Bird and Airbnb are dramatically lowering the
transaction costs of connecting asset owners with asset users, creating
economic efficiency as well
as environmental, human health and societal benefits.
Moving down the product pyramid, we find the component level, where we can
engage in shallow-loop value cycling — the reutilization of product subsystems
such as parts and components. It's a long-standing strategy in many industries;
as we've seen before, there are new opportunities to use shallow-loop value
cycling to
refurbish,
remanufacture
and
reuse
components of an entire product. Again, digital innovations are enhancing the
possibilities of shallow-loop value cycling. The use of so-called “digital
twins” can dramatically improve the operation and maintenance of products and
components. Sensors embedded in product provide real-time performance data that
can be modelled as a virtual digital twin and analyzed using artificial
intelligence. From their performance signatures, operators can predict when
components need to be refurbished to maintain optimal performance and minimize
downtimes.
The final level of our product pyramid is the materials level and the home of
deep-loop value cycling. What's important to recognize is that no matter how
effective your epicycling and shallow-loop strategies are, at some point you're
going to need deep-loop value cycling. This is because eventually your products
components, and the materials that make them up, will wear out. Just think about
that term, “worn out.” It comes from clothes that we wear so long that they
become frayed, develop holes and degrade to a point that they are no longer
useable. What’s true for your clothes is true for everything. Even the best
designed product will, at some point, require the deep-cycling restoration of
your materials.
Humans have long used the biosphere’s deep-loop value-cycling system. Every time
we compost a grocery bag or our coffee
grounds,
we are surfing nature’s existing value-cycling technology. And we are expanding
our use of nature’s system through innovative development of biomaterials and
bioplastics that are designed to be composted at the end of their useful life.
Industry has also developed technology to value cycle geologic materials,
including metals such as aluminum and steel. These can be effective approaches
for regenerating and reusing materials. It's estimated, for example, that over
60 percent of all the aluminum ever produced is still cycling in our economy
today.
The same cannot be said for synthetics materials, however — especially
plastics, as not all plastics can be deep-loop value cycled. There are
basically two types of plastics recycling: One is a thermomechanical or physical
recycling, where you re-melt the plastic and then use pressure to form it into a
new product. Feetz shoes, for example,
uses 3D printing to produced customized shoes. Its system can recover old shoes,
grind them up and cycle them back into another print run; the company claims it
can cycle as shoe as many as 20 times. If you cycled a shoe twice, you would
double your material productivity, so a 20x gain is truly impressive.
At some point, however, plastic properties become too degraded and physical,
thermomechanical cycling is no longer possible. At this point, you need
chemical
recycling,
where you break down the molecules of the plastic and reform them to restore
their properties. Basically, you unzipped the chemical bonds, breaking the
plastics into monomers and re-form them back into polymers. An example of this
deep loop value cycling is Italian-based company
Aquafil, which chemically
recycles nylon-6, a plastic commonly found in clothing, sporting goods, fishing
nets and carpets. Aquafil passes nylon through its Econyl depolymerization
process, and turns it into restored nylon yarn that can be used for the next
generation of products.
The problem is, not all plastics can be chemically recycled, so this becomes an
important design and materials-selection criteria. And even some plastics that
can be chemically cycled are uneconomic, because they demand so much energy in
the process. Energy is another key element in both economics and environmental
concerns, so it’s no wonder that nature has figured an environmentally
sustainable solution, as we will see in our next installment.
Dr. Gregory C. Unruh is the Sustainability Editor for the MIT Sloan Management
Review and author of the new book, The Biosphere Rules: Nature’s Five
Circularity Secrets for Sustainable Profits. For a limited time, Sustainable
Brands subscribers can download a complimentary digital copy of the book
here.
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Sustainability Editor
MIT Sloan
Dr. Gregory C. Unruh is the Arison Professor of Values Leadership at George Mason University in the Washington DC Metro area, and the Sustainability Editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review.
Published Oct 28, 2019 10am EDT / 7am PDT / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET