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Gunter Pauli’s lecture on the “Blue Economy” at Stockholm Resilience Centre was a thought-provoking talk. The presentation was filled with great examples of new ideas and enterprises that have channeled their efforts into creative solutions.
As Pauli himself put it “I don’t need to see business plans with calculations in Excel sheets…If you cannot explain your idea on the back of a napkin it doesn’t work.”
Pauli sums up his business model in three simple points:
– Multifunctional
– Multi-beneficial (only ecological is not good enough)
– Generate value with what you have – Don’t obsess about cutting costs but about generating value
Are we ready to be as creative as we can be with the resources that we have?
Some of the examples which fulfilled the three criteria were:
– Internet through LED lights instead of waves. It is faster (it moves at the speed of light!), more environmentally friendly and can be distributed easily. China is planning to implement it with their streetlights. No need for extra cables and waves that might be a human health hazard.
– Paper made from stone instead of trees. The mining industry produces huge amounts of dust that pollutes the environment and serves no use. Via Stone has developed a method to make paper that requires no trees, no water and can be recycled over 100 times by using the mining industry’s dusty externalities.
– In South Africa, where efforts are made to provide school children with lunch in order to increase attendance, children are served nutrition-poor bread. However, avocado and grape seeds are a massive waste from the factories around Johannesburg. (A small guacamole factory can easily reach 70 million tonnes of seeds) yet seeds are full of nutrition! Thus, they are grinded up and blended with regular flour – providing the children with more nutrition, lowering the waste from the factories, all while taking advantage of nature’s gift. No extra budget was needed, there was no public tender so it was transparent who earned what. A clear example of a new type of bread that produces value for everybody involved.
The new era is not globalization with standardized products – it is local solutions.
To do less bad isn’t good enough. What is needed is to substitute traditional business with a system. Everything we do should be systems based, i.e. be inclusive and transparent, something apparently not taught in business schools.
His recommendation is to focus on the connections and remember, when somebody tells you it is too expensive and it cannot compete on the market – well, then it is time to change the model.
If you still feel unsure about what the Blue Economy is, watch this 3-minute video and feel inspired!