Report from Santa Fe; Gunter Pauli

Music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the Frontier of Science and Engineering Education. For bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees, New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for, 1-800-428-TECH. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Gunter Polly. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Well, you are here because you've written an extraordinary new book about which we will speak in a minute, but it's called The Blue Economy. And tell us the subtitle. Well, the subtitle is very simple. A hundred innovations that in ten years will generate a hundred million jobs. Well, well, but first let's start with your background, your Belgian. And you years ago started a really groundbreaking company called EcoVare.

So, tell us a little about why your company was so different from everyone else and what was needed so badly. Well, you know, we had these amazing experiences in Europe where rivers started to look like huge soap fields. I mean, the foam was just growing and growing and growing and we realized that we were using soap that did the good job in cleaning, but they were not easy by the gradeable that men kept on cleaning the fishes and the frogs for weeks to go. And as a result, it was a need to bring in a new product, a biodegradable product. And so, I had no background in chemistry. I had no background in fast-moving consumer goods, but I said, I'm going to bring a product on the market that will be at least a thousand times more biodegradable than the standard today. And I want to not only have a biodegradable product, I wanted to be manufactured in a factory that is biodegradable itself. At the end of its life, you could take it apart and do something else with it.

And so, we did. And we took 3% of the market without advertising. I was paying my workers half a dollar a mile to ride the bicycle to work. Oh, my car fleet of the company in 91 was running on biofuels. So, we were a bit ahead of our time. Yes. But then, when I went to Indonesia to look at our suppliers in 93, I realized that I was responsible for destruction of the rainforest. Because in trying to use biodegradable products, you were using palm oil, and then what happened? And so, the palm oil, I was using a palm oil, our market share was growing. We needed more palm oil, and our suppliers, when we met them, said, you know, we're going to tear down about even a thousand hectares of rainforests in order to supply you and your future competitors, biodegradable soaps. And then I realized that biodegradability is not the same as sustainability. And so, when they ploughed down their old growth forests, they destroyed the habitat for the orangutan.

All of that. Other unforeseen consequences, as Gorvidal says, no good deed goes unpunished, you were. Exactly. So, it is I had the best of intentions in the world, but I did not make the connection. I did not see the unintended consequences. And that is what made me think about the next business model. Because I had created by then already six enterprises. So, entrepreneur at heart, quite successful in the business, I said, but these business models are not going to do the contribution to our societies, our communities, and our earth, the way we should do it. Well, one thing about the soap that most people don't realize is that the third of the toxic pollution in a normal home is from the cleaning products. Because we want to kill all the bugs. And we changed the tension of the water. Now, when you change the tension of the water, then molecules can start moving over your skin, and in your skin, much faster than you could ever see it.

Never imagine it. And so, what is happening is we're changing the physics of our environment. And if we change the physics, we're changing the base conditions of life. Well, I want to bring it up to the current situation with a big oil spill. Because most people use regular detergents, which are a petroleum product, to get the petroleum, the oil off these poor birds. What did you do about that? Well, we got an award in 93 for having special soaps developed for the birds that are covered with oil flicks. And because when you cleanse the bird with these quite effective, but rather aggressive soaps, you're actually taking all the wax of the bird. And when the bird goes next time into water, bloom, dies. Because from coldness, from water penetrating up to the skin, normally they're fully covered against, they're beautifully waxed. So we developed a special soap that was made out of sugars, alkyl polyglucoses for the experts, APGs.

And so we made these. And so we could take off the slick, the oil slick, and we leave the wax on. And that was one of the products I wanted to introduce, but faith decided differently. Well, you talk about the natural world. And in this book, there are so many wonderful ideas, brilliant ideas that are found in nature that people have been able to extend into commercial and humanitarian uses. For example, the question about mosquito bites. How come you always feel an injection, but you don't feel it when the mosquito is biting you? Exactly. What about this Japanese scientist? Well, the beauty is that the Japanese asked themselves, how come this simple mosquito is always disliked by everyone for their biting. But they're dumb, something is happening there that we really should know about. And what we have looked at that case, and the other 90 cases in the book, is that nature knows how to use physics. It is the geometrical shape of the provinces that allows it to have

with its conical shape a no-pain entry into the skin. Today, all the needles for diabetes patients in Japan are shaped according to... The mosquito bites. Yeah. And it's fantastic. I mean, everyone is scared to get a little shot, and the first time it's very scared. It's dramatic for a kid. But hey, just borrowing that physical shape of a cone versus a cylinder allows you to be able to have the needed medicine without pain. I love these examples so much. If we could just talk about a couple more, the bombardier beetle. Oh, yes. The propels is toxic fumes at its enemy, the ants. I mean, beating the ants, beating a colony of ants, you're going to be smart to be able to do that. I mean, it's just not given to anyone. And so, it has this capacity, again, with pure physical forces

to propel a gas over the ants at ten times its own distance. Now, it's a tiny little animal. It's a tiny little insect, but to propel a gas coming out of its guts. I mean, I tell you, you talk to kids about it, they get excited. They want to know how this works. And of course, it reminds them of other things even being sometimes do when they get too much gas in their intestine. But the beauty of it is that this is now going to be translated into a new mechanism for asthma patients to be able to disperse into their lungs, what before needed chemicals. So, we're substituting the chemistry. The chemistry that actually is damaging the environment, the ozone layer. That chemistry is being replaced by pure physical formula, coming from a little beetle that need to defend itself against ants. Now, from the little beetle to the gigantic whale,

what have we learned from whales, particularly their heart and their ability to create electricity from just potassium sodium and chloride? Exactly, and so, but the most important thing with a whale is that the whale used to be a dog. And the whale went back to the ocean and turned into this huge animal that's a thousand times bigger than the dog. Now, we got to remind us that the size and the shape and the form is all the same for the dog and the whale. But a thousand times bigger. That means that the whale had to secure conductivity of the electric current that is generated a thousand times faster. And that meant it had to get superconductive systems around its heart. And it did it by developing very simple cells. Now, that is giving us the idea on how to replace the pacemaker. So, the pacemaker is basically an irregular current,

a little irregular heartbeat that is then actually caused by heart tissue that is not conductive. So, the scientists who have been studying the whale now make little carbon tubes very similar to the tubes that the whale has made and place them from a part of the tissue of the heart that is very conductive to that part of the heart that is not conductive and we can put the regular beat in motion again. And you know what? No batteries are needed. We eliminate the surgery, we eliminate the battery, we eliminate trauma, and now with a simple catheter it can be placed right into the heart and the whale is the one that gave us the recipe. A couple more because these are enchanting the penguins. Well, you know, the penguins are the ones who are teaching us how to decalanate water. And they have these special glands underneath their eyes and these glands allow them to actually take salty water in the Antarctic and then just sneeze and the salt comes out.

I mean, they have this incredible capacity to let it go through a little membrane, sneeze. Sneeze is basically means put pressure on there. It's again a purely physical effect. I mean, it's like reverse osmosis where we have a membrane and then we have to put in high pressure. Now, we need huge installations that cost a lot of money for it. The penguin does it simply by sneezing. In the sea world, the chambered nautilus, seaweed. I mean, there's so many things. Is it one or two more that you are fond of? Well, you know, I think one of the greatest ones is something that you've seen the mountains all the time, the river. Rivers, when we throw some dirt in the river, somehow the river succeeds in cleansing it. A couple of miles down, downstream. And scientists realize there's some very simple movement that is always being generated. The vortex. The vortex. And this vortex allows to take air out.

And this vortex allows to put air in. Now, when you take air out of the water and you put air into the water, then you're promoting different type of bacteria. You're promoting the aerobes and the anaerobes. And so the anaerobes and the aerobes are stressed all the time. And so whatever layers as biological waste, or even chemical waste, they just eat it. They just clean it up. Now, what is this useful for? First of all, we now have the first ice rink in America in Tellerite. That is, it's going to be equipped with a vortex. And the vortex is going to take all the air out of the water. And as a result, they save 100,000 kilowatt hours of electricity because it needs less energy to make the ice and keep the ice. But better even, now you can see straight through the ice. Straight through. So the advertising remains visible. So now you have a new business model emerging. And that's what we want to do. We want to have an economy with a new business model. Instead of saying to the city, city of Tellerite, you get a pay for this machine.

Pay back maybe a month. But now we say to the advertiser, your advertising, your logo, is going to be visible much longer. You get to pay more per second of contact over TV to the audience that wants to see the hockey game. And therefore, you should install this. So the city gets to free, saving money. And the advertiser gets better visibility for the logo. And as a result, win, win, win, win. And what are we doing? We're just borrowing from the way your river works. Well, I want to come back to your book because anyone who's been entranced by these stories has to know there are so many more in here. But this book was originally written as a report to the Club of Rome. And the Club of Rome is, you can talk about it a little bit, but I want to mention that in 1972, the Club of Rome produced the best-selling environmental book in the history of the world, the limits to growth. And now I'm hoping the same for your book. Well, thank you. Tell us about the Club of Rome and what your mission is

in a book like this. Well, the Club of Rome was a group of top-notch politicians who were very well-placed business people, scholars, scientists, members of a Catholic scientist. We're leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev, Trudeau of Canada. That's right. So they got together and they said, the way the world is going, it seems to be doing good, but we're going to hit the brick wall sometime soon. We have to make connections amongst our industrial growth, our population growth, our consumption of energy, our environmental pollution, and our health conditions. And there was Jay Forrester at MIT, who developed a very special software program, Systems Dynamics, and that they were able to see for the first time what happens if we continue on this growth path and the pollution and the health and the gym. So they put it into a complex analysis, and they said, there are limits to growth. With a model that was used in the 60s.

So I, in the 70s, was a leader of the students in Belgium. And as a student leader, it was the 70s, not the 60s anymore. So I wasn't there anymore being against everything and wanted to just retire in India. I wanted to be the new kind of entrepreneur and business person. I didn't want to go and work for the big companies. I wanted to be the one creating new business models very much influenced by the Club of Rome. Because the president of the Club of Rome was the president of Fiat and Oliveti, two huge companies in those days in Europe. So what I want to do with the book is that we have seen for years the bad news. It keeps on coming at us. And I said, no, we will have to inspire young people to be able to imagine a much better world as entrepreneurs. And I don't make a distinction between the social entrepreneur and the business entrepreneur because whatever entrepreneurship is about,

it has to include social and ecological from day one. How could you do something that is not social and ecological at the same time while making money? And so I needed to think about how do we redefine competitiveness? How do we have a business model whereby we're not asking consumers to pay more to be green? Where we're not asking angel investors to take lower returns because it's green. Where we're not asking the government to pay subsidies and increase taxes so we can live environmental. I'm saying, let's embrace the innovations that have been benchmarking there are known. And let's just expose these innovations to millions of young people around the world and they will create new business models. And that's what we want to do. Well, there's a whole lot of, I have actually some vocabulary questions. Why is this the blue economy? Why is it not the green economy? Because the earth is blue. You look at this beautiful earth from the outside, the universe. She is blue.

The blue sky, the blue ocean. I mean, green refers to chlorophyll and that's the trees. Now, a lot of people have done a lot of great work to get the green economy going. But if you ask people to pay more and investors together, let's return, it's going to remain a French. You have to embrace a new business model. So what we're saying, for example, in the book is instead of going from a toxic battery to a green battery, we say no battery. Yeah. So if you say no battery, you've changed the business model. That means your cell phone, your MP3 player, your pacemaker, all of that without a battery. Now, if we don't have the battery, we don't have the smelting, we don't have the mining, and we don't have the recycling anymore. Now, recycling is expensive, we know we've got to do it. But what if we all have cell phones with our batteries? And the first one is already working for seven months in Germany, and it works with our body heat, and it works with the pressure of our voice. When I'm speaking into this microphone, I'm exerting a pressure,

and that pressure is converted to electricity. It's called pietzo electricity. Now, that electricity today is commercially viable for a cell phone. Now, not only are we now saving the battery, we don't need charges anymore. We lose all the time or charges, somewhere in the world. So we're not off to buy a second charge. We don't need a charger in our car anymore. So we're getting rid of all the paraphernalia around that cell phone. We keep it simple. Now, that is what natural systems teach us. Keep it simple. If you keep it simple, you're more competitive. If you're more competitive, then you are more innovative. Well, you come to Santa Fe to speak for the permaculture, credit unions, 10th year anniversary, and you come just having met with some of the most extraordinary minds of our time. Who did you see in San Francisco? Well, the book launch in San Francisco was together with Fritch of Capra, the author of the Tao of Physics. The Tao of Physics. And you just were at the Rocky Mountain Institute with... Yeah, Amor Lovens invited me to talk to all his staff and bring the...

somewhat crazy and out of the box ideas, but a third of them in the book have been benchmarked. A third of them, we can say, if you don't believe we can regenerate a rainforest from a savanna, that was destroyed by cattle farming over decades. Come and see, we got the project. It's running. It's doing well. It's generating jobs. It is actually providing drinking water. It's generating the fuels we need. And this is not a bunch of hippies getting together. This is about people dedicated to have a future for their kids. It is about what can we do to secure that we respond to the basic needs of all, on this earth, with what we have. And that is perhaps the most important thing. There's so much we do, so much want to do, Lauren, with what we don't have. So we're saying, let's be inspired with what we have. And it's all around us, we just got to be inspired. Is that sustainability in effect?

For me is that it's exactly sustainability. Sustainability is the capacity to respond to the basic needs of all, with what you have. Now, in natural systems, if we look at evolution, everything goes from scarcity to abundance. This is fantastic. This is paradise that is always organized, even the NAMI Desert. There is abundance for the likens. They have abundance. And abundance is achieved by having more diversity. Now, that is the key. We get more diversity. Now, who brings diversity? Well, entrepreneurs can do that. You can use that same technology of the vortex, and apply it in 37 different areas. You start with 37 businesses. Now, therefore, we need the next generation of entrepreneurs. Well, you are the founder and director of something called Zerry, Z-E-R-I. Tell us about it. Well, in 1991, just when I started my factory, I wrote an article saying,

we have to go for zero waste and zero emissions. Where the only species on earth, capable of making something, no one desires, waste. We waste, waste. In natural systems, whatever is waste for one is Newton for someone else. So, I said, we have to design business models that has no more waste, no more emissions. In 1994, when I had sold my business to my partner in Belgium, then the Japanese government was getting ready for the Kyoto Protocol. And the Japanese government said, we need an entrepreneurial mind to lead a team of scientists to design the business model that has zero waste and zero emissions. And I was the lucky one, and I was invited to come to Japan and had a team of 82 academics, not being an academic myself. And that gave me such an exposure to the opportunities to say, well, if we want to rethink mining, how could we do a mining without emissions? And of course, 81 of the professors would say,

not possible, I only needed one who said, I got an idea, and I would say, focus. What can we do to make your idea benchmarked, test it? And so today, in the book, we have the first technologies where we see how we can take 400 million tons of e-waste, all the old computers and electronics that we have. We crush it into dust, and with a simple film, we can go through it, and we take out all the metals, one by one, at ambient temperature and pressure. And that technology is inspired how bacteria have been focusing on very specific metals they need to be able to live. We also need iron. And we need a little bit of copper. And so we have a symbiosis with those species who teaches us how to get the copper out and the iron out. Now, that is not put on a film. And you can just go through it and take it up. So, for three years, I was exposed to one idea after the other and the scientists kept on providing. So in 96, when we were getting ready for Kyoto,

I decided to put all the knowledge with the support of the Japanese government and the United Nations into a foundation called Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives. Because we were not ready to just do the research, we wanted to implement. One of the things as you talk about this kind of cascading systems design, which is that you have a system input here, the output is waste, but that is then the input for another system. That's the raw material. And then the output, the waste output of that is raw material for yet. And it's a magnificent model. Well, everyone is doing it around the world. Every living critter on this earth is doing it except one. Yes. But we can learn if I have my cup of coffee and I know that 99.8% of my coffee is wasted. Because I will only ingest 0.2%. Then I know I can press that coffee waste together. I can calculate with shiitake and I can farm shiitake.

And then when I harvest the shiitake. There is a mushroom. There is a mushroom, very healthy mushroom. Now, that shiitake leaves waste behind. And that waste is rich, so rich in amino acids, that we can take something that you could never have fed to the chickens or the pigs. You can now feed it to your pigs. And so we have coffee, we have mushrooms, and we have animal feet. Three cash flows. Yes. Yes. And we thought it was waste. And so we said we can do that with our biological waste. But let's take now a bottle, a glass bottle. We know we have done so much to try to recycle bottles. But turning a bottle back into a bottle is like asking a tree to take the leaves from the fall and put them back on in the spring. It doesn't work. It's too expensive. So we have been trying to make bottles out of bottles, and that's too expensive. So without taxation, it doesn't work. And I don't like taxes.

We are all happy to pay a little bit of taxes to contribute to our communities. But we're not willing to be tax to death. So what I'm saying is that, well, if you take now the glass bottles, you crush them, you inject it with CO2, then you make a building material. And that building material is better than steel and reinforced concrete. And that building material is actually inspired by the multi-functionality of nature. Nature, everything has multiple functions. Nothing is done for one purpose only. And so when you have that glass foam with CO2 embedded in it, you can actually build with it. It is an insulation material. No rats will go through it. No molds will ever grow in it. And no water will come through. So I got five functions in one product. We're almost out of time, and one of the most wonderful things you do. And we could talk for so long. You're work with Gunter's Fables and with children, because as Dr. Goodall does, Jane Goodall with her roots and chutes,

her outreach into the young people to get to teach them new ways of thinking and to empower them. What are you doing with young people? Well, having kids myself, I just wonder how can I bring that whole body of knowledge? Two kids, and they don't have to wait till they're 18 or 20 to read a book that's a bit too scientific for them. So the only way that I could do it is tell them stories, Fables. So I wrote 36 Fables. And these 36 Fables bring 1,500 scientific subjects to the kids without talking science. And they will know and understand why does the zebra have black and white stripes? How does the water get in the coconuts? I mean, no one is pumping the water up into the coconuts. I mean, and the apple falls down from the tree, but the apple had to get up in the tree before it could subject itself to the law of gravity. And they don't teach it in school. So bringing that body of questions, not answers, body of questions to the kids,

and give them hints through illustrations, through some words that are we play with, the kids started imagining, imagining, and they find solutions. Well, you have sparked my imagination so much. I wanted to show this book again. The blue economy. I think that people will have just their minds opened up when they look at all the possibilities that you've set forth there. I'd like to thank our guest today, Gointer Polly. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd like to thank you our audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report from Santa Fe are available at the website, Report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at Report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by a grant from New Mexico Tech on the frontier of science and engineering education. For bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees,

New Mexico Tech is the college you've been looking for, 1-800-428-T-E-C-H. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.