Responsible production research and ideas

‘Biomimicry’ is the idea of using nature’s designs and processes to solve human problems, which stretches back to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘flying machine’ that he based on the structure of bats’ wings. More recently, the idea has been popularized by the scientist and natural history writer Janine Benyus, who sees it as the key to unlocking sustainability. “Life’s technologies tend to be elegant,” she says. “They sip energy, they shave material use, they really avoid toxins – they’re all the things we’re looking for these days.” Benyus describes biomimicry as like “tapping into an R&D lab that you could never afford and that has been going on for 3.8 billion years”, and argues that “when the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we’ve reached sustainability”.

It’s a concept that the US carpet firm Interface is pioneering with its ambition to create a ‘factory as a forest’. Working with Benyus’s consultancy firm, Biomimicry 3.8, Interface has reimagined its factory at LaGrange in Georgia as behaving like a high-performing forest that provides an array of ecosystem services, such as recycling nutrients, carbon sequestration and water storage. So Interface has devised a range of ecological performance standards based on a healthy, local forest ecosystem, which it will use to measure the factory’s contribution to the soil, atmosphere, biodiversity, water and carbon levels. The metrics have helped drive innovations, like creating carpet tiles that sequester carbon, returning more fresh water to the water table than used in manufacturing, and reducing levels of water runoff from the site. It has also encouraged the factory to reach out to nearby businesses and act as a ‘pollinator’ of best environmental practice locally as well as in its own factories worldwide, transforming the business ecosystem further afield.

The metaphor of an ecosystem and using the natural sciences to understand how to work more sustainably compels businesses to reidentify themselves in intriguing ways. What ecological role does a company play in this business ecosystem, for instance? Is it an extractor, concentrator, recycler or disperser of nutrients? Does it pollinate and create new life, or help consume and break down waste material? Is it large enough to act like a keystone species that impacts the health of the whole ecosystem? Or is it one of the many smaller organisms that performs essential routine tasks?

More and more scientists are recognizing how important biodiversity is to maintaining a stable and healthily performing ecosystem because of the unique abilities each ecological community has to respond to a disturbance. This ‘response diversity’, as it’s called, is equally important for the resilience and high performance of a business ecosystem. Yet how much does the current profit-maximization culture encourage a diverse range of businesses and business models? Is our business ecosystem becoming overwhelmed by a eutrophication of nutrient-hungry corporates that are choking the oxygen from other smaller firms? Is the exponential growth demanded by so many companies causing desertification of the business ecosystem to the detriment of everyone?

More recent academic thinking sees the world as a complex socio-ecological system, where the health of society (people) and the natural world (planet) are the most important and decisive factors, on which all human activity is dependent – including profit-pursuing business. This idea is most powerfully illustrated by the ‘Doughnut Economics’ model that was developed by Oxford economist Kate Raworth for Oxfam in 2012. It depicts a sustainable economy as like a ring doughnut, existing between a social foundation and an ecological ceiling, whereby the needs of people at the centre of the doughnut have to be serviced without overshooting the Earth’s resources that surround and sustain them. In this context, all business activity operates in constant tension between social need and ecological capacity.

It might seem blindingly obvious that business and profit are materially rooted in and systemically dependent on people and the planet, but this socio-ecological framing helps debunk the prevailing order that business is somehow separate or more important. And even if you’re one of the many responsible businesses that are already well aware of this fact, the latest thinking in this field (called ‘complex adaptive systems theory’, or CAS) takes this reframing further and fundamentally challenges what a business’s strategic approach to sustainability should be.

CAS theory suggests this socio-ecological system is made up of an interconnected web of different systems – be they natural, social, cultural or economic – that relate to each other in complex, non-linear and dynamic ways. So complicated and cumulative are these relationships that it becomes almost impossible to scientifically prove the impacts of any one part on the overall socio-ecological system. Thus when a systemic disaster strikes, it’s easy for individuals to pass responsibility, claiming ‘it wasn’t me’ because other people were to blame too. (A vivid example of this phenomenon was the 1952 Great Smog of London, where nobody and everybody was partially responsible for the death of up to 12,000 people.)

However, CAS theorists suggest that the flipside of this systemic complexity and volatility is that the effects of any individual can also be remarkably powerful too – which should be hugely encouraging to responsible businesses doubtful of what impact their individual efforts can make. Who knows how many catastrophic ecological tipping points have been narrowly avoided by the responsible actions of just one person? Equally, how many social and economic recoveries have been sparked by the influence and investment of one business? The most important thing is for businesses to try to understand how these various systems operate and interact so they can recognize what agency and impacts they have (or could have) on the resilience of society and the natural world.

Researchers in the field of complex adaptive systems (see above) argue that sustainability needs to be subtly reframed as supporting socio-ecological resilience – or ‘resilience-based stewardship’, as they call it. In practice, this would encourage responsible businesses to look beyond the impacts of just their operations and take an active role in the preservation and enhancement of the wider social and ecological systems their operations are dependent on. So rather than Unilever just looking to improve the sustainability of the palm oil it sources from somewhere like Borneo, it has worked with other national and international groups, governments and agencies to prevent the wider degradation of regional and global ecosystems and alleviate the underlying social issues that damage the longer-term resilience of Borneo. (It’s interesting to consider if Unilever not buying palm oil from Borneo at all would actually help or hinder the country’s sustainability, such is the complexity of systemic dependencies.)

As well as providing a more holistic and systemic approach to sustainability, resilience-building offers a better strategy for a business’s long-term profitability and sustainable growth too. We know the mortality rate for businesses is very high – barely half survive more than five years and less than a quarter more than 15 – suggesting most companies lack resilience. But innovating and investing in any of the 17 Global Goals will help build overall resilience and produce returns far beyond their initial targets. As the former IBM executive and sustainability expert Bob Willard explains, the Global Goals “define the end state for a resilient and sustainable environment that supports a resilient and just society, that fosters a resilient and inclusive economy. There is $12 trillion in potential economic growth linked to achieving the [Global Goals]. It’s in the self-interest of companies to contribute to them.”

What Willard describes is both the ‘social boomerang effect’ and multiplier effect that investing in socio-ecological resilience has on the resilience of business, whereby any contribution by the business is returned many times over in the long run. Lessening inequality and poverty, for example, increases the potential market and consumer base for a business’s products. While better education makes for a more productive workforce, and cheaper and cleaner energy increases profitability. The interconnectedness of each of the Global Goals means they all contribute to the overall resilience of society to the mutual benefit of everyone – including businesses. So despite the sometimes daunting complexity of tackling any systemic problem, the rewards are often systemic, complex and many too.

For a responsible business, there are numerous benefits to abandoning any linear ‘make-take-waste’ processes in their operations and reimagining their products as part of a circular value chain that is closer to the regenerative cycle of nature. With no waste, just the indefinite reusing and recycling of resources, the financial savings and reduced environmental impacts are potentially enormous. Such a ‘closed-loop’ process encompasses every stage of a product’s life cycle, from raw material extraction and energy use during manufacture to sales and distribution and after-sale use, looking to eliminate waste and pollution at every stage.

For instance, the electric vehicle (EV) industry has many circular economy challenges, but one key part is for the millions of used batteries it will generate once they’ve declined to 80% capacity after 8-10 years of use. Most have potential second-life applications as energy storage in housing or the national grid, for example. But currently, many retailers, local authorities and other key stakeholders in the EV industry don’t know about this and aren’t collaborating with EV manufacturers to provide more options for reuse and recycling of batteries.

To ‘close this loop’ and end silo-thinking in the sector, the UK government could help incentivise or compel the recycling or reuse of EV batteries through legislation – something already being planned as part of the EU’s Circular Economy Action Plan to make all products easier to repair and less wasteful. Billions of public money is also already being invested in a new Battery Industrialisation Centre in Warwickshire, which could form the hub of a large-scale advanced battery ecosystem in the UK.

Such collaboration and cross-sector partnerships with other businesses, organisations and public sector bodies are essential for a circular economy to work. They provide the knowledge, skills and capacity to help responsible businesses ‘close the loop’ between their individual operations and the wider social and environmental systems they depend on and need to protect. These collective activities might be harder for companies to direct and measure than their own in-house operations, but there can be no effective strategy for a business’ sustainability that doesn’t also support the resilience of wider society and the environment.