Our Director of Innovation, Jared Yarnall-Schane, spoke on stage at SOCAP 2024 to share a unique perspective on how we can learn from nature to cause positive ecosystem disruptions. By exploring his childhood memories of watching a beaver family transform a forest into a pond, and by sharing lessons learned from working with startups in the Ray of Hope Accelerator, he shared with the audience a story of aspiration and hope. Nature holds millions of years of evolutionary and ecological strategies that can help us disrupt industry ecosystems to create a healthy, thriving and diverse economy. A copy of his talk is below!
FINAL TALK – Nature as Disruptor: Innovations for a Resilient and Circular Economy
Have you ever watched beavers make a dam, turning what was once a forest into a pond? They are ecosystem engineers that have sculpted land across North America. When I was growing up, I had the privilege of watching a beaver family in action. I often wondered what drew the beavers to this specific forest, and through watching them and their work learned how ecosystem disruption could foster and create an even healthier environment.
Over the course of my career, I have sourced, funded, and trained over 100 early-stage startups solving critical climate and social issues, like food insecurity and plastics pollution. Now as the Director of Innovation at the Biomimicry Institute, I work closely with scientists and entrepreneurs who are learning from nature to solve some of the biggest issues of our time. Like the beavers, our startups disrupt their industry ecosystems to create a healthy, thriving, and diverse economy.
We work to create a world that looks and operates like nature. For those of you that haven’t taken a recent biology course, or spent time nerding out about beavers like me, I am going to share with you the one lesson I wish was taught to me in my engineering training.
It’s all about the flow of energy and nutrient cycles.
Most (but not all!) energy enters our planetary system via the sun. Primary producers, like trees and algae, turn that sunlight, combined with water and CO2, into chemical energy via photosynthesis. Secondary producers, like our beaver friends, come along and eat that plant material. Eventually, the beaver or other organism dies or sheds part of itself (like a leaf from one of those trees), and is then broken down by decomposers. Thank goodness for fungi and bacteria! The energy that entered the ecosystem dissipates – that tree leaf gets broken down to its basic building blocks, distributed throughout the environment, and become part of something new.
Now, here is the lesson I was taught while studying engineering…
Energy enters the system by a fuel, probably oil. We bring a lot of material from one location to another, heat it up to superhot temperatures, ship this halfway around the world, add in a bunch of chemicals and heat it up one more time. Then, we sell this product, use it for a few years, and at the end of its life it ends up in a landfill. All along this process, materials and chemicals leak out into the environment as pollution.
That’s a little different from the natural model, right?
Of course, there are examples of where we don’t follow this straight linear economy model. Recycling or bottle returns come to mind, and there are some great and needed innovations happening in the circular economy space.
But here’s the catch. The 2nd law of thermodynamics tells us that all systems dissipate energy – or perhaps easier to understand, all systems will leak!
We hear and see examples of this every day. Oil spills, trash on the side of the road, literal islands of plastic in our ocean…
However in a natural system like the beaver pond, the wood the beavers use to make a dam eventually decomposes. What we learned in the world’s shortest biology lesson shows us that this wood was made with water, sunlight, and CO2 (and of course some other essential nutrients). At the end of its life the branches the beavers used breaks down, to turn back into another tree, or a blade of grass, or maybe even algae in the ocean.
Here is the brief and bold idea I’d like to share – what if we created materials and chemistry that accounted for entropy, for leaks? How would this evolve our understanding of the circular economy? For most of human history we created things that were made out of biological materials all around us. What I am proposing now, and what we see happening via our work at the Biomimicry Institute, is a resurgence in learning from and working with nature. Advancements in big data, genetics, AI, and nanotechnology allow us to understand nature like never before. We can achieve our climate and environmental goals via the implementation of nature-inspired innovation.
Let me share an example. Did you know that 50% of microplastic pollution in the ocean is from paint? 50%! The primary way paint is made today is to mine a mineral or oil resource as a pigment or dye, combine it with a plastic acrylic binder, and put it in a solvent like water.
But, how does nature create the beautiful colors all around us? Let’s take a look at this peacock feather. It gets its color from its nanostructure, a phenomenon known as structural color. This means we see the color based on the physical structure of the feather, not a pigment or dye within it. Many butterflies get their brilliant colors the same way. And unlike paint that sheds microplastics into the ocean, peacocks and butterflies shed feathers and wing scales that decompose back into basic building blocks, ready to be turned into something new.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have been studying this, and have created alternative paints made out of 100% cellulose, the same ingredient in that beaver’s tree, with results that are better, longer lasting, and more affordable than traditional paints and dyes. We have supported two spinout companies from this lab, both of whom are going on to reinvent and disrupt the $200 billion dollar paint and coatings industry via their nature-inspired solutions. At the end of their product’s life, the cellulose paint will decompose back into its basic building blocks. I love this example, because it makes us ask the question – what if we could avoid microplastics altogether, by learning from nature?
Just as beavers transform their environments, we can change our industrial systems by embracing nature-inspired solutions. Millions of years of evolution have provided a blueprint for developing sustainable materials and practices. By shifting our focus from linear to circular models, and ensuring that anything that leaks from our system can be used positively by surrounding natural systems, we can mitigate pollution and create products that harmonize with the environment rather than deplete it. We can foster a future where industry not only thrives but also enriches the ecosystems it inhabits, sharing in the resilience and ingenuity of nature itself.
