[Scpg] The Blue Economy :Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis by Gunter Pauli*

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

The Blue Economy
	*	Submitted by GEC Team on Fri, 
11/13/2009 - 04:16 GEC-4: Technology and

  http://www.worldacademy.org/forum/blue-economy
The Blue Economy
Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis
by Gunter Pauli*

How a new generation of entrepreneurs can bring 
innovations to the marketplace, secure the basic 
needs of all,  and make sustainable businesses 
competitive.
Mere months after the 2008 financial meltdown, 
the International Labor Organization (ILO) 
reported the loss of 50 million jobs. Developing 
economies were deeply affected by massive layoffs 
in the formal sector and the loss of income in 
the informal sector. It was a social shock that 
unsettled the world. In essence, the world 
economy for the past few decades was capitalized 
on money that simply did not exist. Downsizing 
and outsourcing were some of the key driving 
forces of every major industrial group. "Wealth" 
was generated by making "assets" appear as though 
by magic through leveraging credit and creating 
financial instruments that contributed not even 
remotely to the value of the business. Money was 
multiplied over and over in special accounts 
without risk, initiative, or production of real 
assets. Innovation was limited to investments 
that could produce multiple short term returns. 
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, verged on 
becoming a vanishing breed.
The form of capitalism that has dominated world 
societies is entirely disconnected from peoples' 
real needs. Some two billion people struggle to 
get by on less than two dollars a day, lacking 
access to food, water, health, and energy, the 
most basic requirements for survival. Over 25% of 
the world's youth are unemployed. Yet one billion 
of us are overnourished and swim in 400 million 
tons of electronic waste with higher metal 
concentrations than the ores extracted from the 
earth. Conservatively, the top 70% of the world's 
wealth is concentrated in the top 10% of the 
population.

The business model that requires companies to 
invest more in order to save the environment will 
be replaced with a framework that permits less 
investment and more revenues while building 
social capital.
Fortunately, times are changing. This book is 
about that change. As the second decade of the 
21st century sets the stage for a new economy, 
the core question we answer is, "What is the 
business framework we really need?"
Up to now, the model driving our economies 
depended on perpetual growth, requiring ever more 
resources and investments. This model has 
inherent flaws. It leads to unjust societies, 
highly skewed and exploitative economies, and 
devastated ecosystems. The business model that 
defines corporate environmental responsibility in 
terms of size of investment, and defines 
corporate success as increased shareholder value 
and grandiose executive compensation, must be 
replaced. The new economy must be more effective 
and more collaborative. It must become truly 
sustainable, introducing innovations that permit 
less investment, generate more revenues, and 
build the strengths of a community and builds up 
social capital - not debt. This is the business 
framework that will drive the new Blue Economy. 
This is the framework that will seek out and 
define true sustainability for all living species 
on Earth.
The prevailing economic model predicates that 
scarcity is the major limitation. Industry 
searches for ever higher agricultural yields and 
manufactory outputs, demanding that the Earth and 
human labor produce more. We must re-evaluate 
this notion and begin to more fully utilize what 
the Earth and labor produce, rather than 
demanding more materials and more output. It is 
time to end the insatiable quest for ever lower 
costs that drives business towards economies of 
scale through egamergers and acquisitions 
financed by billion dollar loans. It is time to 
adopt broad-based innovative strategies that 
generate multiple revenues and greater cash flows 
while creating more jobs. It is time for a Blue 
Economy.

In shifting our focus to economies of scope, the 
framework of the Blue Economy opens possibilities 
for a new generation of entrepreneurs who use 
what is available to sustainably address the 
needs of the Earth and all its citizens.
The shift from the model of core businesses based 
on a single core competence and economies of 
scale to a framework of multiple businesses with 
aligned economies of scope may sound unrealistic 
to the executive trained by any leading business 
school. However, the current global crisis 
highlights the need for an framework of economic 
development that is based on fundamental 
innovation and that will generate desperately 
needed jobs while sustainably addressing the 
needs of the earth and all its citizens. This 
"blue" approach is not only viable, it has 
already begun to take root. Four years of 
research has identified a portfolio of 100 
innovations including whole systems models that 
have the potential to generate as many as 100 
million jobs worldwide over the next 10 years.

Cascading nutrients and energy
The first set of innovations, all proven and 
benchmarked at a remarkable scale, cascade 
nutrients and energy the way ecosystems do. This 
means that everything contributes according to 
its capacity, and everything stays in the 
nutrient stream - even waste is not wasted. 
Instead of contrived scarcity and shortages, what 
we see in the new economic framework is abundance 
- of food, energy, jobs, and revenue. For example:
	*	Under the leadership of Paolo 
Lugari, Las Gaviotas in Colombia converted a 
desolate savannah created by 400 years of 
extensive cattle farming into a lush rainforest 
that provides residents with abundant water, 
food, and fuel while building valuable social 
capital. The project regenerates biodiversity, 
and becomes an island of peace in a world of 
poverty and violence, while the land value 
increased more over 25 years than the shares of 
Microsoft, turning the local population bankable.
	*	Small-diameter wood is a 
pernicious fire hazard in forests throughout the 
world. In New Mexico, USA, the peoples of a 
Native American Picuris pueblo have used a whole 
systems model introduced by Robert Haspel and 
Linda Taylor centered on mushrooms and their 
growth substrate to converted this fire hazard 
into a resource that provides jobs, food, and 
livestock feed while upholding their traditions 
and culture. This stands in stark contrast to how 
this hazard is handled elsewhere in the western 
US. Each year we see dramatic images of wild 
fires devastating rural and even suburban areas 
of California.
	*	The silkworm converts leaves into 
nutrients, which easily blend with soil bacteria, 
quickly attracting micro-organisms and 
regenerating topsoil that will safeguard 
agricultural production and build food security. 
Additionally, silk -as discovered by Fritz 
Vollrath based at Oxford University- itself can 
be used to replace high performance titanium in 
health care and consumer products, reducing the 
burden that titanium mining places on the Earth, 
while sequestering carbon. Simply replacing the 
titanium and stainless steel razor requires the 
planting of 250,000 hectares of mulberry trees on 
desolate and infertile land, which apart from 
generating top soil creates an estimated 12.5 
million jobs.
	*	Anders Nyquist (Sweden) 
mathematically codified the termites' ability to 
utilize air flows for temperature and humidity 
controls into a model that makes automated 
climate control systems obsolete, successfully 
moderating the effect of ice-cold Scandinavian 
winters. With the new technology made possible by 
his research, buildings can be designed to warm 
or cool as needed. The "energy saving" model of 
locking all living species into an airtight and 
heavily insulated room cannot truly serve the 
purpose of energy savings. It merely creates an 
environment where the infectious species 
proliferate. If one person sneezes, then everyone 
sneezes.

Substituting "something" with "nothing"
Our society is heavily accustomed to consuming 
products that create massive waste and pollution. 
These products and their manufacturing processes 
have squandered limited resources and mired many 
in living environments that are loaded with toxic 
residue and the spoils of production. The genesis 
of M1H1 or swine flu can be attributed to just 
such a scenario. Real, lasting solutions - truly 
sustainable solutions - require a fundamental 
shift in our awareness. We will need breakthrough 
innovations, such as the second set of 
innovations which exemplify how "something" - 
models of unsustainable production and 
consumption - can be replaced by "nothing." For 
example:
	*	Consumers do not realize that the 
cost per kilowatt hour of electricity stored by a 
hearing aid or a pacemaker battery may easily 
surpass 100!. The 40 billion batteries we dump 
into landfills every year required 
energy-intensive mining and smelting in their 
manufacture. While a "green" battery may someday 
be developed, it remains dependent on mining 
which is part of the old business model. The 
technology is available that would permit us to 
simply eliminate the battery altogether. The 
Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has already 
presented a cellphone powered by the differential 
between ambient and body temperature and the 
pressure generated by our voice. Professor Jorge 
Reynolds (Colombia), a pioneer in whale research, 
has developed the first pacemaker that requires 
no batteries, no surgery, and only local 
anaesthesia, cutting costs carried by social 
security by factor 200, and dramatically reducing 
the trauma for the patient.
	*	The alarming proliferation of 
drug-resistant bacterial and viral strains 
requires science to venture towards solutions 
based on technologies that mirror natural 
systems, such as the ability of red algae seaweed 
to deafen bacteria. Australian scientists Peter 
Steinberg and Staffan Kjelleberg (Australia) 
discovered that red algae seaweed could mitigate 
the spread of bacteria - without killing them and 
without poisonous chemistry - simply by making 
the bacteria unable to communicate. If bacteria 
do not hear others of their species, they move on 
and do not populate a surface. This means that 
they cannot create a biofilm, a superstructure 
that plays a critical role in many diseases.
	*	The simple but elegant power of a 
vortex as industrialized by Curt Hallberg and his 
team at Watreco AB (Sweden) replaces chemicals 
with purely physical effects to remove bacteria 
and air from water. This eliminates the need for 
bactericides while cutting energy consumption. 
Many chemicals are replaced by the forces of 
physics. Since a vortex is reliably generated by 
gravity, it has the potential to generate 
drinking water with a minimal expense of energy.

There are over one hundred such innovations 
described in the forthcoming book, The Blue 
Economy, presented as a Report to the Club of 
Rome. Each has been benchmarked and brought to 
fruition in different parts of the world. They 
are are just a few examples of what is possible, 
and the insights they supply give us a positive 
future outlook. The new "blue" business framework 
will work with what is locally available to 
generate multiple revenues and respond to basic 
needs. It will provide a platform that merges 
creative entrepreneurship with breakthrough 
innovations to nurture life, secure food and 
shelter for all, and sustain the Earth's natural 
systems.

This mirrors the evolutionary path of nature. 
Indeed, just as ecosystems evolved to ever more 
efficient nutrient and energy cycles, bringing 
ever more diversity while developing resilience, 
flexibility, and performance, the Blue Economy 
will increasingly rely on less energy and provide 
more diversity through innovations brought to the 
market by ever more entrepreneurs fortified with 
a vision of real sustainability and prepared to 
take the risks. More players will be encouraged 
to respond to critical needs, linking the 
triangle of innovation, sustainability, and 
entrepreneurship away from scarcity and into 
abundance. Debt becomes social capital, external 
costs become opportunities to differentiate on 
the market.
Re-imagining our economic future requires 
entrepreneurs in science, social affairs, 
business, environment, and culture. We must make 
information available, exposing the opportunities 
we have to accelerate these innovations on the 
market, and refrain from imposing the laws. We 
will reach out to others we never imagined 
working with, so that we efficiently and 
purposefully allocate resources so that we can 
respond to the needs of all with what we have. We 
must to move away from an economy where the 
engine of growth is indebtedness loaded upon our 
children and grandchildren, squandering those 
future generations' material resources.
The incapacity to imagine meaningful jobs and to 
provide worthy challenges to a whole generation 
equates to telling the young that there is no 
future for them, that their generation is lost. 
With over one billion young people entering the 
labor market in the next decade, we must move 
toward a Blue Economy, based on what we have and 
what we can share with those who have not.

*Gunter Pauli (1956) is an inveterate 
entrepreneur whose scope of initiatives span 
business, culture, science, and education. 
Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome, 
exposed Gunter to a systems approach which has 
influenced his research and projects ever since. 
In 1994, with the support of the Japanese 
government at Tokyo's United Nations University, 
he launched an initiative to design an economic 
framework and business model that converts all 
waste, including emissions, into a value- added 
cascading model that draws from whole systems in 
nature. In 2004 he undertook a massive research 
project to identify innovations that would shift 
business towards higher levels of competitiveness 
and sustainability, while generating millions of 
jobs through the creation of a platform for 
entrepreneurship. In Spring 2010 he will 
personally direct a two-year initiative that will 
regularly present Blue Economy business models to 
inspire entrepreneurs to translate these 
opportunities into worldwide business 
initiatives. Gunter is a member of the Club of 
Rome and the author of 17 books, published in 21 
languagues, and 36 fables that bring science and 
entrepreneurship to young children. He is married 
with four children, including his adopted 
daughter from Zimbabwe, Chido Govero.

This paper is based on the new book The Blue 
Economy: 10 years, 100 Innovations. 100 Million 
Jobs,published by Paradigm Publications (New 
Mexico, USA) with the support of UNEP and IUCN.
Written by Prof. Dr. h.c. Gunter Pauli,
Founder and Director of ZERI,
September 2009
>>>>>>>>>>>>

Santa Barbara City College Center for Sustainability
  Hosts:
From Green Jobs to the Blue Economy

with Gunter Pauli of the ZERI Foundation
Saturday, December 5, 6:30-9 pm 2009
Admission $10 general public, $5 students
SBCC West Campus, Fe Bland Forum

How a new generation of entrepreneurs can
bring innovations to the marketplace,
secure basic needs for all,
  and make sustainable businesses competitive.

         Gunter Pauli suggests by emulating Nature 
we can evolve from an economy based on scarcity 
to an economy based on abundance---the cascading, 
nutrient rich, Blue Economy.

	Gunter Pauli, famous eco-entrepreneur and 
passionate proponent of green development 
worldwide, will discuss the potential for green 
jobs to revitalize and reinvigorate our economy 
with creative systems thinking in a public talk 
on December 5,  hosted by the Santa Barbara City 
College Center for Sustainability.  Author of the 
soon to be released book "The Blue Economy, 10 
Years; 100 Innovations; 100,000,000 Jobs", Pauli 
shares four years of research and case studies 
identifying 100 innovations that have the 
potential to generate as many as 100 million jobs 
worldwide in the next 10 years.

	The former president of the hugely 
successful biodegradable soap company Ecover, 
Pauli was responsible for Europe's first 
ecological factory located in Belgium, that 
subsequently turned into a "green" tourist 
attraction.  He founded "Zero Emissions Research 
and Initiatives" (ZERI) at the United Nations 
University in Tokyo, and established the Global 
ZERI Network, redesigning production and 
consumption into clusters of industries inspired 
by natural systems.  Leapfrogging past stagnant 
models of business that no longer work, Pauli is 
known for innovative strategies for the first and 
third worlds, involving the genius of both street 
kids and savvy business icons alike.  Noting that 
whole systems thinking is a learned process best 
learned early, Pauli has written children's books 
in many languages and helped create curriculums 
for schools. 

	At the evening talk Pauli will share 
successful entrepreneurial projects from around 
the world that exemplify ZERI's waste equals food 
and system design logic, including a program to 
convert coffee pulp to mushrooms, brewery waste 
to pig food, and spirulina from the heat of a 
coal power plant. Waste is always seen as a 
resource that with creative thinking, can be used 
to create multiple enterprises from singular 
ones, with benefits for the economy and the 
environment. Pauli is fond of saying that returns 
on investment from these kinds of business models 
far exceed those of companies like Microsoft.

	Gunter Pauli was born in Antwerp, Belgium 
in 1956. He graduated in Economics from Loyola's 
University in Belgium and obtained his masters in 
business administration from INSEAD in France. 
His many entrepreneurial activities span 
business, culture, science, politics and the 
environment. Pauli is the founder and former 
President of Worldwatch Europe, and a member of 
the Club of Rome. He is the author of 17 books in 
21 languages.  Pauli currently lives in Japan.

The event takes place on Sat, Dec 5, 6:30-9pm at 
the Fe Bland Forum on the SBCC West Campus, 721 
Cliff Drive. Admission is $10 for general public, 
$5 for students.  No reservations are required. 
For more information please call (805) 965-0581, 
ext 2177,  email msbushman at sbcc.edu; 
http://sustainability.sbcc.edu

Hosted by the SBCC Center for Sustainability. 
Co-sponsors: Santa Barbara Permaculture Network 
Non-Profit, SBCC Scheinfeld Center for 
Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and the SBCC 
Students for Sustainability.  Part of the SB 
Carbon Economy series convened by Quail Springs & 
Orella Ranch.



ZERI Workshop Info:


***December 3-5, 2009  Workshop
  In-depth 3 day ZERI training with Gunter Pauli 
to be held at Orella Ranch on the Gaviota Coast 
as a part of the Carbon Economy series. $675, 
includes workshop, camping on-site, and meals. 
For more information  www.carboneconomysb.com or 
www.zeri.org.

Gunter Pauli on YouTube:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piH8lIZDwLQ

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Ctoy1PuuY

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbJHo7sbZU



Quotes by Gunter Pauli:

"There is no unemployment in eco-systems"

"Eliminate pollution by absorbing waste the way ecosystems do"

"A new model of enterprise, see the company as an 
open economic system and a closed ecological 
system"

ìNature does not know the concept of waste; the 
only species capable of making something no one 
desires is the human speciesî.

-end-


	*	Lo
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