Zero Emissions according to Gunter Pauli
Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Gunter Pauli. A talk that turned out to be very interesting. For anyone not familiar with Pauli or his idea’s:
- He was founder and CEO of Ecover, the first company to market ecological cleaning products on a large scale. Their ecological factory (pdf) is still an example for the industry! FastCompany interviewed Pauli about Ecover in 1993, so go read that if you are interested in its background and underlying principles.
- Following that, he set up ZERI, the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives foundation that is committed to creating ‘a new paradigm of sustainable industry by targeting zero gaseous, liquid and solid emissions, and by making Zero Emissions a world-wide industry standard’;
- He has been advising diferent governments and large companies, like Unilever, on how they can decrease their emissions.
As you can telll, this is someone with a vision. A vision that, once implemented, can change the way we use and live in our environment. And the best part is, he is not only trying to explain us how we can transform our waste generating consumer-world to a green, sustainable and viable economy, he is working on projects where hardly any waste is left unused. Using all available innovation and creativity he can muster, backed by a solid scientific background.
So, why is our current economic model fundamentally flawed? I will let Gunter explain it to you:
The capacity to produce much more with less is the basis of the homo economicus, and represents the heart and soul of economics. While all agree that the main objective and contribution of economics is its drive towards productivity and efficiency, responding to the needs on the market, it clearly has a long way to go before it can pretend to even have come close to that goal. Economics is a science, which still operates in Stone Age, at a time when humanity has already entered Space Age.
If economists were to search for a new production model which is based on systems, inspired by nature, which emulate nature and which operate in harmony with nature, then this science is likely to succeed in providing the minimum of goods and services to all on the globe without exhausting the Earth’s limited resources, without engendering a collapse of the ecosystem on which we are dependent.
Continue reading the article → (at the Internet Archive).
(Dit is een van de items afkomstig van mijn oude weblog, dat niet meer beschikbaar is online. In de komende tijd zal ik meer inhoud terug online zetten.)
