12 Sustainable Design Ideas From Nature

“In this inspiring talk about recent developments in biomimicry, Janine Benyus provides heartening examples of ways in which nature is already influencing the products and systems we build.”-TEDx

“Learning about the natural world is one thing, learning from the natural world is another.” - Janine Benyus

There are 2 things that we need to ask ourselves in order to learn from the world around us.


#1 How does nature make things? When we make things we heat up materials and shape them into the products we use today. This has a 96% waste output and only 4% product output. Nature cannot afford to do that. So it has found a way to use and reuse 100% of its resources.

With this in mind perhaps we are the ones that are not as technologically advanced as the world around us. Are we living in the dark ages when it comes to making things?

Life makes everything by adding information or structure onto matter in order to give it function.


#2 How does life make ‘things’ disappear into structure? Does it pile it up in a trash bucket and wait for the garbage man to come? Of course not, it has a plan for that. Life naturally has other life that uses the “waste” from one system to build up another. The excess fruit that falls from a tree nourishes the soil, organisms and animals around it. Those systems plant and nourish the seeds of the fruit tree. Everything works together to create and sustain life.

12 Sustainable Design Ideas from Nature

1. Self Assembly- Nanotechnology.

2. CO2 as a Feed Stock- You can make biodegradable plastic out of CO2.


3. Solar Transformations- We can greatly enhance our solar technology by getting it to the efficiency of plants.

4. Power of Shape- We can mimic nature to redesign our cars, planes and boats. Or we could design buildings that are self cleaning because of the shape.

5. Water- Pulling clean water out of the air or fog.

6. Separation technology- Separating metals and other things the way nature does it.


7. Green Chemistry- What if we could filter and separate without chemical run off what if we could do it naturally?

8. Time Degradation- Packaging that could dissolve naturally on cue to reduce waste all over the world.

9. Healing- What if everything from our cars to our houses healed themselves when they were damaged? What if we could use the technology of other specialties to heal and regenerate our body?


10. Sensing and Responding- Avoiding car accidents like grasshoppers avoid colliding even when there are hundreds of thousands of them in a small area.

11. Growing Fertility- Not just growing food but growing them in a way that generations later the soil and food is even more nutritious. We need to start working on not just feeding ourselves now but the long term opportunity of the whole ecosystem to thrive.


12. Life Creates Conditions Conducive to life- Life wholistically cleans nourishes and sustains the environment while preserving its own species and the systems around it for thousands of generations in the future.

Nature is truly remarkable and it is obvious that there is a lot we can learn here.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Author: Kirsten

Source: The Spirit Science

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