Green Options

Why Your Business Should Care About the Birds, the Bees and the Burrs

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” according to a well-known proverb.  Those words seem particularly apt in today’s world of environmental, political, and economic pratfalls.  Fortunately, Mother Nature holds many of the answers to our most basic questions regarding design and equilibrium.  Internationally-known scientist Danya Baumeister will make the argument Oct. 15 at the BuildGreen Conference in Philadelphia that many savvy researchers, designers, and manufacturers would do better to leave the lab and look instead at the 3.8 billion years of evolution everywhere around them.  Baumeister is hardly the first to view the world as an R-and-D goldmine – one that could bring us new products, designs, and services to help both our environment and economy – but she is one of today’s leading biomimicry proponents.  And if you think biomimicry is a new idea, think again.

In a first for small residential wind, the biomimicry-inspired turbine company Helix Wind has partnered with Atoll Financial Group to offer loans for its small helix-inspired wind turbines; so as to make installation of your own 50+ year supply of free energy just as easy as financing a car. Or solar.

In recent years, solar companies have come up with various ingenious ways around the upfront cost of DIY roof power, from renting (Power Purchase Agreements) to partnering with financing arms (like Sun Run), to simply adding extra property tax payments to your current mortgage (like Berkeley First).

(Of course, most monthly payments can be calibrated to come to about the same cost as the electricity bill you will no longer owe, so there is actually no extra expense really: it’s just a swap. But seeing that upfront cost can be prohibitive, even if you know how much cheaper it is than sticking with your utility over time)

Move over Nature…the famed strength of a spider’s web silk now has some competition. Bio-mimicry and bio-materials–both emerging new sciences that seek to utilize and/or reproduce or modify natural biological materials and properties for commercial usage–has been seeing an explosion of research and experimentation of late. Recent bio-materials experiments with spider dragline silk (taken from the Araneus spider’s silk glands) have resulted in a bio-mimicked new material that is stronger than its natural version.

What a wonderful time of year to express gratitude for our natural world and how it nourishes us. Discover through this free visual guide how an enriched school or family environment can enhance student understanding of personal well-being and the natural world.

The guide is available for download in pdf format, and while it is designed for kids in a learning environment, there is something in there for everyone to learn from.

It’s graciously offered by the Center for Ecoliteracy which is dedicated to education for sustainable living. Their work is based on these four guiding principles:

Nature is our teacher

Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place

Sustainability is a community practice

The real world is the optimal learning environment

My first two posts about the triple bottom line for green businesses addressed the people who make up an enterprise as well as the people who supply it, use the goods or services created, or invest in the enterprise.

First coined by John Elkington and articulated in his book, Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of the 21st Century, the triple bottom line doesn’t drop the idea that businesses should earn a profit. It adds that businesses should do so in ways that take into account environmental and social performance in addition to financial performance. It requires a strong and efficient organization, perhaps even more so. Not only do you need to make a profit, you need funds and resources to reach beyond where mainstream business stops. A triple bottom line means expanding the spectrum of values and criteria for measuring business success to include: the planet, people and profits.

A Planet Bottom Line

Is what is being produced or services provided better for ALL life? A Planet bottom line continually examines inputs and outputs, addressing the materials we use and how we use them as well as minimizing – if not eliminating — waste. Ecopreneurs recognize and incorporate ecological limits into their business models. Many shun the use of toxic chemicals, hazardous materials or processes, or exploitative approaches to nature. A growing number of people are adopting an approach to product development or design that involves biomimicry.

Editor’s note: Modular (or prefabricated) housing is hot, and our friends at Low Impact Living have the lowdown on some of the companies driving this trend. This post was originally published on Thursday, June 12, 2008.

It seems everyone is “going modular” these days with the rapid growth in the movement of green prefab design and construction. The buzz in modular construction is causing a rush of new designs, innovative products, and advanced modular systems being introduced. The goal of prefab is still the same as minimizing waste while maximizing efficiency. To learn more about prefab design and what makes it a compelling form of green building, please click here.

No longer are the days when just calling yourself a prefab company is considered environmentally progressive. Homes are now being made from materials like reused shipping containers, recycled steel, and certified sustainably-harvested wood. The new challenge for prefab companies is balancing the economics of innovative sustainable design with the realities of construction and raw material costs.

We want to highlight some companies doing some very interesting work in the prefab space.

Envision Prefab shows their commitment to the environment by attempting to maintain a zero carbon footprint in both manufacturing and production of their models. Their e-House reuses shipping containers transformed into seamless interior spaces, while including a laundry list of green systems such as tankless water heaters, solar panels, and LED lighting.

A biologist by training, Janice is a passionate proponent of using nature’s wisdom, based on billions of years of refinement, to discover “nonpolluting, energy-efficient manufacturing technologies” that can be applied to provide elegant design solutions for commercial enterprises.

Inspired by the diverse kingdom also known as our biosphere, researchers are developing a new way to efficiently meet the demands of web users. The inspiration is derived from a very intricate yet communicative dance that honeybees do when they’ve found a hot spot of premium nectar. Since these bees have no central commander and highly inconsistent resources, they do a dance to communicate to each other how to efficiently collect a lot of nectar in little time. This “swarm intelligence” has been used as an inspiring model by researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology to “improve the efficiency of internet servers faced with similar demand challenges”.

The efficiency development model helps servers that used to be assigned to only one task to now multitask and move between tasks as needed. In other words, the servers can now meet the fluctuating demand that the internet has more quickly. This model reduces the chance that a website gets overwhelmed with demand and locks up. It is also said to increase efficiency and service by 20 percent.

Georgia Tech professor Craig Tovey was struck with a curiosity of honeybee behavior in the early 80s. He realized through conversations with a colleague from the University of Oxford that “bees and servers had strikingly similar barriers to efficiency.” Bees have very inconsistent resources. Sometimes there is an abundance of nectar to collect and sometimes there is very little. Year after year the supply is different and the location of the nectar oasis’s change. Yet somehow, they always seem to maintain a fairly consistent supply of nectar in the hive. Tovey saw this as a stimulating intricacy in the natural environment that yielded very effective results. Tovey among other colleagues conducted research for decades on how they work and how to use their brilliance in our built environment.

The greatest breakthrough was the discovery of the waggle dance. Australian zoologist Karl con Frisch won a Nobel Prize for this. When bees that hit an oasis return to the hive, they do a dance at the hive floor, wagging their tail back and forth. Each movement of the dance indicates location, scent, sound and gives other foragers clues about where the oasis of nectar is.

Add this biomimetic project to the board! Architect, Mick Pierce and engineers at Arup Associates successfully took inspiration from nature when designing the heating and cooling system of the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, the country’s largest office and shopping complex. Where did they get this inspiration? African Termites!

If you’ve ever seen a termite mound you should still be impressed by these built by African termites in Zimbabwe. The termites build mounds reaching multiple feet in order to farm a fungus that feeds them. The finicky fungus must live at exactly 87 degrees F. While temperatures outside the mound walls vary by about 70 degrees F, they had a problem to solve. “The termites achieve this remarkable feat by constantly opening and closing a series of heating and cooling vents throughout the mound over the course of the day. With a system of carefully adjusted convection currents, air is sucked in at the lower part of the mound, down into enclosures with muddy walls, and up through a channel to the peak of the termite mound. The industrious termites constantly dig new vents and plug up old ones in order to regulate the temperature,” describes Abigail of Inhabitat.

“Turn on, Tune-in, drop out.” The words that defined a generation were uttered by Timothy Leary at the first Human Be-in 40 years ago in Golden Gate Park.

Initially planned to address the eminent issues of the decade, the original Be-In has evolved into an art/music/digital cyberculture exploration that now focuses on the latest in the GREEN movement. The 2007 theme of Biomimicry is designed to be “a launching pad for

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