Lovely example of biomimicry from Ecovative via Grist:
Usually you do not want fungi in the walls of your home. But Ecovative is building a home in which having fungi in the walls is the entire point. The “Mushroom Tiny House” will use mycelium (the mass of threadlike “roots” that mushrooms use to take in nutrition) for insulation.
According to Inhabitat, this stuff is basically asbestos except that it’s not bad for the planet, won’t give you cancer, and is related to something you might put on a pizza…
Wandering the web the other day, it occurred to me that the continuous improvement process “5 whys” could be a powerful tool for sustainability. I was watching a LinkedIn conversation on the challenges of consumption, and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of depth to the conversation.
If you’re interested in seriously cool sustainability then there’s a book you should read. It’s about more than being good – it’s about reinventing the basic mindsets and models behind the systems that deliver our products and services. “Natural Capitalism” is a big read – and it discusses some exciting strategies for creating the…
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller
“Business doesn’t listen!” is a regular complaint that I hear in environmental circles – but what IS business? Essentially, business is a group activity – a process. There is no physical thing called business that we can put in a wheelbarrow. We may be able to put a building, a product, a machine or a person in a wheelbarrow…
The MRP production line When a manufacturing business installs a new production line, the installation doesn’t stop the day the line is turned on. Excellent performance isn’t expected on Day 1, in Week 1, and often isn’t achieved in Month 1. The performance achieved initially isn’t accepted as the best possible – for a big…
I was inspired by ‘Cradle to Cradle’ when it first came out – as a business analyst in the manufacturing game it just made so much sense. Good to see a followup – “The Upcycle” is going on my reading list – after I get through “The Blue Economy”. As an Ontological Practitioner who believes…
