The Growing Power of Circularity … from Ecovative’s mushrooms to Lanzatech’s biofuels … 10 steps to more positive impact

March 17, 2022

The curse of plastic is everywhere – in our overflowing bins, along beaches, and in trees. Retailers across the world have recognised the problem, charging for plastic bags in some countries, making plastics a criminal offence in others. Humans have produced more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic since the 1950s, according to the UN, most of which ends up in landfills and could take centuries to decompose.

Ecovative, believes it can massively help the world reduce its plastic waste by using mycelium, created from the root-like structure of mushrooms.

The New York biotech company grows mycelium into specific shapes and sizes by taking organic plant waste and inoculating it with mycelium. After the mycelium grows through and around the agricultural materials, it binds them together, providing a natural alternative to packaging materials made out styrofoam. The process takes around a week with minimal water and electricity consumed to make the parts.

Beyond packaging materials to replace plastics, Ecovative sees application in fashion with vegan leather, plant-based meats, construction where it is strong and has excellent insulating properties, and in healthcare to build new organs. At the end of the material’s useful life, you can break it up and you can put it in your own garden. A nutrient not a pollutant.

“My dream is to one day grow a lung and seed it with lung cells and use the mycelium to create the capillary network and use the human cells to create the actual lung,” says founder Eben Bayer.

Getting more from less

Andrew McAfee’s book “More from Less” tells the story of an unexpected change in our relationship with our planet. “Throughout the Industrial Age increases in human population and prosperity came at the expense of the earth, that pattern no longer holds in most of the world. Instead, we’re now able to improve the human condition while also treading more lightly on the world: consuming fewer resources, using less agricultural land, reducing pollution, bringing back species we’d pushed to the brink of extinction”.

He makes the counter-intuitive argument that two of the most important forces responsible for the change are capitalism and technological progress. In the past this combination caused us to take more and more from the planet over time. Now, it’s letting us get more from less. So what changed? Essentially, we invented the computer, the network, and a host of other digital tools that let us swap atoms for bits. Think, for example, of how many different devices and media have vanished into the smartphone. Quite literally, these inventions have changed the world.

Evidence from the USA shows that even though population and prosperity continued to increase steadily, resource consumption did not. Instead, it started to decline. The country now generally uses less metal, fertilizer, water, paper and timber, and energy year after year, even output grows. This phenomenon is known as dematerialization of the economy, and it’s bringing us into what McAfee calls a “second enlightenment”.

Air and water pollution have also decreased greatly, and many threatened species have seen their numbers rebound. Even greenhouse gas emissions have declined substantially in recent years. We are now getting more from less, most advanced nations are now post-peak in resource use and other exploitations of the environment.

Circular design

A decade ago, former long-distance yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur launched foundation to promote a “circular economy.” This sought to create a new economic model for businesses, which eliminated waste and replenished natural resources. Using a closed loop system, it encouraged reuse, sharing, repair and recycling as ways in which an organisational ultimately has a “zero impact” on its world.

Nike sees sustainable innovation as a design challenge – not just of its shoes and clothing, but of its entire business ecosystem – from the dyes to colour its fabrics to the production systems of its shoes, and the fair wage of workers in its factories.

John Hoke, Nike’s Chief Design Officer says “One of the most powerful things design can do for Nike, athletes and, frankly, the world, is play a role in creating a better future by making better choices that holistically and thoughtfully think through the complete design.

“By considering everything around the design solution – how we source, how we make, how the product is used, how it’s returned, how it’s ultimately reimagined. As designers, we are wired to be problem solvers. We get to think about designing ideas that have the highest performance impact possible. While simultaneously having the lowest environmental footprint or impact.”

Nike recently partnered with many other companies and academics to create “10 Principles of Circular Design” as a process to rethink products, how they are made and sold:

Materials: Selecting low impact materials that use pre and post-consumer recycled feedstock.
Cyclability: Designing with the end in mind. Thinking through how a product will be recycled at the end of the use phase.
Waste Avoidance: Minimizing or elimination waste in the product-creation process, and beyond.
Disassembly: Products that can easily be taken apart and recognizing the value of each component.
Green Chemistry: Chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use of hazardous substances.
Refurbishment: Prolong the use of a product through repair of component parts or materials
Versatility: Products that easily adapt to growth, style, trend, gender, activity and purpose
Durability: Products made strongly by construction details, method of make and durable material choices
Circular Packaging: Packaging that is purposeful and made of materials that can be repurposed, recycled or biodegradable
New Models: Establishing new service and business models to extend the product life cycle.

Over the years, Nike’s view to solving problems that embraces sustainability has broadened dramatically, not just to reduce waste but to improve products. One of the most significant was the development of “Flyknit” which ended the process of cutting pieces of fabric for shoe uppers, and instead knitting them to the perfect shape. This massive improved the fit and performance of the shoe for consumers too. Recently they developed “Flyleather” which takes recycled natural leather fibres, and turns it into high performance leather, with all the qualities of old, plus more.

Net positive impact

Many companies embraced the challenge. Of the many impacts of industrialisation, carbon emissions have perhaps been one of the most damaging. “Offsetting” became a popular action, companies paying to plant new trees which capture the carbon, as a way to neutralise their impact, or reduce their guilt, of carbon-emitting factories and travel.

Ant Financial, for example, created a fantastic loyalty program for its Chinese consumers, enabling them to collect offset points for any kinds of purchases they made, equivalent to their environmental impact. The points allowed people to plant trees in “Ant Forest”, supported by a gamified app which shows you how your tree grows, and the huge forest across Chinese wasteland is thriving.

However creating zero impact seems like only a start. Some organisations, most recently Microsoft, have set a target for “negative carbon” by which they capture more carbon than is emitted. Datacentres, for example, use huge amounts of energy, so by building solar and wind farms, they can power their facilities, and contribute renewable energy to local communities, reducing their demand for traditional fuels.

LanzaTech, based in Chicago, is looking beyond trees to capture carbon. The biotech start-up has developed a way to turn emissions into ethanol, a renewable fuel. Instead of letting carbon emissions bellow out of factory, it is piped into a bioreactor and fermented, like in beer making, into ethanol. It uses a natural gas-eating bacteria developed specifically for fermentation. One steel mill can recyle enough carbon to create 9 million gallons of ethanol, which was then demonstrated by Virgin Atlantic as an effective aircraft fuel. Similar initiatives include Braskem turning city waste into biofuels in Brazil.

We are now at the point where businesses are not simply creating zero waste, but can create a “net positive impact”.

The impacts can be environmental, but also social. A business can give more to the world, in its total “balance sheets” of resources and effects, than it takes. It can do this most specifically, not by just thinking of creating more efficient processes, which seek to reduce waste in a similar way to reducing costs, but by increasing the upside. Creating products and services that embrace a sustainable benefit, and through the purchase and application by millions of customers, can multiply the positive impact many times.

Additionally, by thinking at an ecosystem, to work with the many different partners involved the creation and distribution of their solutions, then they have more opportunities to ensure that the net impact is zero, or positive, and again more ways to multiply this impact.

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