Biomimicry

Biological systems offer design strategies for successfully adapting to an age of climate change and resource depletion. Insights from nature will be essential in creating a green and sustainable future for humankind.

"In the ongoing drive to create and communicate about sustainability in the emerging economy, it can be useful to conceive of sustainability not as a quantifiable end goal, but as an emergent property.  [...] We could learn a thing or two from the collective creatures, the super-organisms, for whom emergence is no big deal —or whom sustainability is given, understood and inevitable."

"When urban infrastructure meets nature’s designers, amazing things can happen. More and more, biomimicry is being thought of as a way to reconsider the ways we build and operate cities. Today, these lessons are being actively applied in the realm of urban infrastructure and design in an effort to make places that are more sustainable, more livable, more intuitively designed and, at their core, more natural."

"In nature, there are communities of organisms that interact with each other and the nonliving parts of their environment. That’s what an ecosystem is. Living organisms include plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and more. We humans are part of the ecosystems we live in, but we don’t always contribute as much to the community as we could. Let’s look at ways some businesses have learned to start behaving more like cooperative members of nature. This story is about beer but can be applied to any business because it’s about how emulating an ecosystem can lead to less waste while supporting various industries."

"In recent years, the desire to emulate botanical processes for environmental benefit has inspired "design similes," such as cities that behave like forests, buildings that act as trees, or products that operate like plants. Although such comparisons serve to promote ideal goals, they are difficult to put into actual practice. Irvine, Calif.-based Newlight Technologies has found a way to achieve the latter objective, with a plastic that is made by mimicking the material production method of plants. AirCarbon is a type of polyester that is made from air rather than oil. Like plants, Newlight's "GHG-to-Plastic" process captures CO2 from the air, and isolates the carbon and oxygen elements. The company then polymerizes C and O and reassembles them into a long-chain thermopolymer. The resulting plastic is biodegradable, recyclable in multiple stages, and has programmable compostability."