Replace something with nothing

The dominant model of production and consumption around the world creates that which sustains and nourishes life, but it also creates numerous products and services that we could do quite well without. Human beings are the only form of life on Earth that has created such a model of production and consumption, which unnecessarily consumes valuable resources and creates massive volumes of waste. A Blue Economy approach however, considers how we can replace many of the artefacts of modern life we consider indispensable, with alternative systems that meet the needs and provide the services of value. Even though traditional engineers, supply chain managers and designers are trained to replicate the well-known, our experience suggests that embarking on something that is unknown, is one of the key thought processes that allows us to be innovative. This creates room for entrepreneurs.

When we observe how Nature deals with a wide variety of challenges, we find that the solutions are kept simple, and the chemistry benign. This insight offers great inspiration for the design of new technologies and the implementation of new business models that allow us to go beyond ‘business as usual’. For instance, dolphins fish without nets. Fishing nets, especially dragnets, clear the ocean of all fish and damage the ecosystem while catching many unwanted forms of sea life that we do not eat. On top of that is the unintended consequence that this fishing technique destroys the sea floor in order to catch our food. Dolphins, on the other hand, fish by creating air bubbles in the ocean that lift smaller fish to the surface and allow larger fish to escape to reproduce. This is clearly practical and sustainable, given dolphins have succeeded in feeding themselves using this technique for around one million years. Humans have been fishing for 6,000 years, initially relying on spears, hooks, cages, and hand nets, and then graduating to enormous nets, radar, drones and electronic devices for finding fish, and even deploying dynamite and acids. These forms of fishing have resulted in overfishing, leading to the collapse of fisheries around the world. The substitution of nets with the use of air bubbles opens up a new world that includes the ability to recover depleted fish stocks by saving female fish with eggs, as they are heavier and are not caught up in the upward flow of bubbles. So the challenge is to design fishing boats that catch fish with air bubbles, substituting “nets” with “nothing”.

The same logic has been applied to the treatment of hard water. Typically, water is treated with chemicals to remove suspended calcium carbonate. The flow of water through a vortex, the natural swirling of water based on the insights of Victor Schauberger, the Austrian forester who observed the flow of water for decades, increases the pressure on the floating particles, sedimenting quickly in a retention tank. The physics of the vortex replace the chemistry, reducing investment costs and operational expenses, improving performance substituting chemistry with “nothing”.

The substitution of “something with nothing” is a powerful principle that allows us to simplify a process, to avoid consumption of materials and resources, to reduce reliance on energy, and to eliminate causes of social and environmental distress. This is perhaps one of the most fundamental shifts away from the traditional practice of “inventing better” and improving what is there already. It is not in defiance of what has been achieved, it is rather a profound question that we can ask every time, and reach fresh insights into the possible, instead of merely trying to reduce the damage. The key is the determination to ask “the not question”: what can I not achieve when we do not use what has been traditionally used. The absence of a battery (using water storage and flywheels), chemicals (using the awesome power of a water vortex) and the fishing net (using bubbles like dolphins do) opens our minds to imagine new possibilities and, with inspiration from Nature. The possibilities are endless if we are ready to be surprised with the genius that we can find in Nature, provided we are ready to look.