Last February, I discovered Gunter Pauli with this article (in French). Curious, I read one of his books : "Upsizing – The road to zero emisisons”. It made me think a lot, not only because I had never heard before of these very interesting ideas, but also because I felt directly concerned. He wants a "green revolution" not through politics but through the private sector, by the creation of new businesses and by learning new methods of management. He explicitely mentions the business schools and recommends we (I am a student of business school) change our management lessons.

"Every politician, every business leader should know that it is possible to improve the productivity of a company by creating more jobs and by reducing dramatically pollution." That’s how the chapter 1 begins, and the rest of the book explains the “how” (how to improve the productivity...). Taking the example of nature, the main idea is to reuse all waste products to make them productive. Thus, all the waste is reinserted into the production system and becomes a recoverable material. G. Pauli develops an “Upsizing” approach, as opposed to downsizing, that is to say that by making money with the waste, the interest is to develop the business, the turnover and thus create jobs.

G. Pauli is not crazy, he doesn’t make some theories without knowing the result of it. He knows what he’s talking about : in 1994, he created the Zero Emission Research and Initiatives (ZERI), a research organization that helps to set up, among other things, zero-pollution systems. He relies on many examples and figures. "With an average of 95% of waste, it is less than 5% of the agro-forestry production that is actually used. If we create an economic system that uses 95% or 100% of this mass, we could meet 20 times more material needs and the Earth wouldn’t have to produce more." One problem he wants to solve is the food crisis. And as he says, it’s not by injecting chemicals to increase the productivity of the Earth that we will manage but by increasing the productivity of raw materials, by eliminating the concept of waste. He writes about a second green revolution, after the food revolution in India, "a revolution based on the exploitation of waste, which corrects the most glaring inefficiencies and creates a diversity".

Rather than trying to make a perfect synthesis (impossible), here are two extracts of the book that I really liked :

 "If humanity still thinks that the world will always produce more, we should be prepared to be really disappointed. At the contrary, if we learn to make better use of what the Earth already produces, then meet all of our need for water, food, health care, shelter, energy and jobs will become possible."

 Several times, he uses the example of the brewery that could produce mushrooms, which is apparently a very nutritious food : "When a beer brewery wants to transform its waste grain into cattle feed, it has to make it travel long distances at a high cost. But if a bakery settled next to the brewery, it would have nearly 50% of the raw materials it needs to produce its bread ! And, even better : if a mushroom farm settled close to the brewery - and we know this is possible because we did it in Namibia and Canada - the farm would produce one tonne of mushrooms for four tonnes of waste grain."

Gunter Pauli

Why did I put this article in my Danish episode ? Because I discovered that several companies had applied the ideas of G. Pauli before G. Pauli, in Kalundborg, Denmark. Peder Andersen, the only teacher I’ve met there, could not find information on the subject. So here’s just a summary of a document found on the internet to understand how and why this "industrial symbiosis” was created, as it is called :

"Interview with Jorgen Christensen, a consultant for the Institute of Symbiosis Kalundborg Denmark since 1990, directed by Jean-François Vallès Synopter in the report" Ideas for the Enterprise of the Future "(2001).

This is an environmental network of resources that emerged here in Kalundborg, between four businesses and a community. The idea was to save resources and create an advantage in terms of environment. [...] The cooperation is nothing extraordinary, it’s just common sense. When two companies have begun to think that the reuse of waste of a company would be one thing SMART [Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound].

The partners are : Asnaevaerket, a coal power plant, the largest in Denmark ; Statoil refinery, also the largest in Denmark ; Gyproc, which produces plasterboard and other building materials ; Novo Nordisk is a pharmaceutical company ; and the city of Kalunborg as a service provider and supplier of electricity and water. Two other companies recently joined the network of symbiosis.

The network began when the refinery was located here in the early sixties. A refinery needs large amounts of water for cooling. The water could not be taken in the conventional system. There was an agreement between Statoil and the community for the establishment of a system for delivering water from a lake. Needs have increased and they sought new sources of supply. Then it has developed trade with three other companies.

Another project has emerged in the early seventies, Gyproc, the factory that manufactures plasterboard, that used a lot of energy for the heating of gypsum and plaster. They wondered if they could use the excess gas from the refinery as an energy source for the drying process. This had never been done [...].

Little by little cooperation among firms has developed. In 1998, there has been one of the largest projects : the supply of steam from the power plant to the refinery and Novo Nordisk. [...] The steam supply was always good quality. It is transported over 3km by pipelines. The work was done at the same time as the community expanded its network of central heating. So the community also took advantage of this heat. [...]

The symbiosis was mainly interested in three areas : optimizing the use of water, saving energy and reusing waste. [...] For example, when the refinery was using the cooling water from the lake, it rejected it in a river. The power plant has been suggested to reuse this cooling water. Although it was a bit hot, they could use it. They saved water by building a pipeline between the power plant and the refinery. [...]

You regularly hear people saying that the environment costs money, but not in this case. All projects were conducted in a win-win approach in the sense that they did not spend money but earned or saved some. [...] The companies have realized themselves that they had interest in cooperating."

We can notice many similarities between the ideas introduced by G. Pauli and the "industrial symbiosis" in Kalundborg, although there is no link between the two. I also believe that ZERI, the body created by G. Pauli, has not yet managed to establish a "zero pollution" system at such a large scale, with such big companies (ZERI tries more to create businesses, and almost always in developing countries).

Thank you for reading entirely this article that concludes my Danish episode and this blog. Well, not quite, because I will soon publish a very special article-balance.

See you soon, Be green, Ben