seeds of wonder

Pretty Rubbish?

Playing at their favourite tree-swing, as a diversion, my son and his friend decided to do a bit of archeology on the launch slope. they were pretty chuffed to unearth a pair of 'old' (apologies archeologists at the random arm-waving on the age) bristle and bone toothbrushes, as well as a couple of other bits and bobs. Our suspicion was that the mound was the result of an old Victorian tip from the nearby woodman's cottages.

The toothbrushes were quite simply crafted, the bristles having since rotted away (how long would our so-called disposable toothbrushes take to break down now?), and gone to provide nutrients to the soil as would the bone when it followed later.

As I turned them over in my hands I couldn't help but wonder if our rubbish would be just as interesting to look at and just as nutritious to the ground - McDonalds super-size cartons, Pret Sandwich boxes, Walkers crisps, Coca-Cola cans, Greggs Bakers bags, KFC, Subway. I mention these as these are the brands that have the biggest share of voice on the streets - quite literally - with Mcdonalds packaging making up 29% of litter on the streets and in the countryside according to a survey with Keep Britain Tidy. Research released at the same time by Manchester business school suggests that litter leaves a damaging legacy on a brand's reputation. What do the organisations think - some such as McDonalds seem to make a certain degree of effort - though nothing especially ground-breaking, others such as Red Bull seem to be dissonant at best. When contacted by Tim Barnes from Litter Heroes, who identifies them as one of the worst offenders in his part of the country, RedBull released a statement effectively saying not our responsibility, it's up to the customers to get rid of it properly.

Disappointing, short-sighted and some-what behind the times with many organisations nowadays recognizing to some degree or other their role in ecosystems of community and environment. But beside the truculent nature of the response a few things strike me about the litter debate.

1) There's no doubt there's a huge littering problem. Debate is stuck between 2 absolutes, throwing away (good?) or littering and an argument over where responsibility lies. There's also no doubt that many of our measures are not working - law and logos alike as -Bill Bryson noted on the Litter Heroes website 

 "Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person" 

2) A less linear and more systems based approach could be taken. With the Keep Britain Tidy logo approaching mid-life perhaps some time for some fresh thinking.

3) Nature litters. All the time, especially in Autumn. Like the thinking in Cradle-to-Cradle and Gunter Pauli's Systems Thinking, could the very nature of litter be transformed. Like blossoms on a tree could it be pretty. Or perhaps biomimicry could be called upon, with inspiration from nature's habit of timed-degradation to ensure it breaks down within a pre-determined time - either as fleeting as butterfly wings for products with a short life span, or to work under tougher, more elemental conditions and last longer taking a note from creatures such as mussels and mussel glue, all then returning into the system as a nutrient. 

4) Perhaps litter could be edible and we could eat it, or feed it to the ducks. We could mimic the spiral structure of the womb to expand and collapse and make it easier to carry and perhaps encourage the right behaviours when out and about. 

5) These supported by other measures such as well positioned bins in hot spot areas sponsored by the companies in question. Rural litter seems to be mostly linked to motorists, as we know by nose-picking, singing aloud and road rage, we all take on a different personality inside our cars. Understanding the nature of the problem, or jobs that motorists are trying to get done, would help drive more solutions for temporarily storing used packaging in cars.

The science is there, there's been much innovation on sustainable packaging and big consortium packaging organisations such as Faraday have been exploring biomimicry and packaging for some time.

It might seem an awful lot of trouble for a minority problem. But actually it's linked to the bigger picture. If this litter is the visible minority, lets say 3%, what about the invisible majority, the other 97%, that we've comfortably thrown away - landfill or recycled - pulped or burned.

If all those Mcd cups, Greggs bags and Pret boxes are recycled into other materials, paper etc. We may feel somewhat better about it? But much of the recycling system is a bolt-on trying to deal with an imperfect input. If it's incinerated for so-called recovered energy, 57 chemical by-products are released. If it's pulped for paper there's still stuff left over, a sludge, in fact according the the environment agency, in UK alone 300,000 tonnes of the stuff - and I guess that must be the dried weight as its converted into an ash - a mixture of bleaches, chemicals, inks and short paper fibres. This has to go somewhere and a lot of it goes back to landfill - I'm not sure the alternatives and plans to divert a third of this into other uses are anymore palatable. In true brush it under the carpet-style it's hidden in our homes and food - building industry - making bricks, cement and other building products - and farming - agricultural liming - a process which influences the pH of the soil - in other words spread on the fields by being legally sold as a soil conditioner! Carrots anyone? See Toxic Sludge is Good for You for further reading on the pr industry.

I guess you could say this re-packaging is systems thinking to a degree, but it only works when dealing with honest inputs and outputs and the resulting products - such as litter - can be both designed and treated as a valuable benefit to all, a truly closed loop network, not by appearances alone.

Organisations like McDonalds and RedBull need to recognise both their inputs and outputs in the bigger picture, the whole linked network with proper published auditing. Would they want to proudly proclaim that their bags of carrots are grown with the aid of chemical paper-mill sludge from their cups?

Not that I want to bash them over the heads with a green club, I'd like to see the whole thinking-turned on its head - as Gunter Pauli's Systems Thinking does, to view every output as a valuable commodity, doing away with the concept of waste, if designed with the right frameworks from the start.

Michigan State University School of Packaging has recently won $400,000 from Coca-Cola to create a packaging innovation sustainability centre - to measure the environmental impact of packaging. Let's hope some good stuff, rather than corporate wool, comes out of there.

A big part of the answer lies in school education - not education on the environmental issues - the symptoms - but on the causes, linear silo thinking. The thinking that separates, biology from home-economics, chemistry from philosophy, business from art and so on. To encourage systems thinking in the workplace we need to sow the right seeds at school. Perhaps then we will design litter as we'd like to see it outside our front-door and that might in turn ensure it's what we'd like to know of it when it's under the floor and on our food.

How do we leave the door open for what we don't yet know

I love watching TED, it's interesting how often you come across something that links with an idea that was forming in your mind, or with other things you happen to be reading. Speaking of which it's TED 2009 this week. I'd love to be there.

Picking up the trail on other people's work on vibration, fascinates me. Luca Turin's talk on 'the science of scent' sparks a number of thoughts. Luca explored how we actually register smell? 

This is still a controversial area with a handful of competing theories. The shape model has it that it is to do with molecular shape - the lock and key mechanism. Luca's work, inspired work of Wright and Dyson, however set out to demonstrate that smell worked by vibration and not shape. That each molecule, and the bonds connecting them, responsible for a smell - such as cut grass - vibrated at it's own unique frequency. (And that frequency can be translated into audible range as a note). This was interesting enough in itself as I've always thought that colours sing - that would be one of my ways of describing them, each with a different tune. Smells are often described as having a note. This is not to say that shape isn't important in smell but Luca's theory is that smell is not a consequence of shape alone or even primarily.

Luca was able to demonstrate his theory when he left academia and set up a company "putting someone else's money where my mouth was" to work for industry developing fragrance and flavours. A French perfumer set him the challenge of finding a compound that smelt like coumarin. Coumarin is a sweet hay-like, tobacco smell, very important and popular in perfume (and so financially valuable) but actual coumarin is toxic and can't be used as I guess eroding your customer-base over time is not much good for business. Undaunted, they profiled coumarin -that is analysed its vibrational spectrum- and set about finding a match. They found one after just three weeks - virtually unknown. Quite a different shape, but an almost perfect match on vibrational frequency and the same sweet tobacco scent.

" When you're a scientist you're always selling ideas, people are very resistant to ideas .. when you put a 10 gm vial on the table and it smells like coumarin and it isn't coumarin, and you found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody's minds wonderfully."

A great story and well worth a watch.

Watching it leaves me with several thoughts;

1) Connected to the vibrational theory - how does this connect to or intersect the work of other researchers or traditions, on vibrational theory such as Candace Pert, Helen Langevin,Traditional Chinese Medicine, which in turn has interesting connections with the Patricia Kane's biomedical work, this touches on our understanding of our communication systems - what are the opportunities for medicine, industry and biomimicry.

2) This is more about mindset and the process of creativity and innovation itself. When I studied science the shape theory was presented as an accepted and complete'ish picture. In both education and innovation how do we leave the door open for what we don't yet know in order for us to think more creatively about solutions and the way stuff works. Generally we like black and white pictures rather than probables, but the trouble is this does tend to fix our way of seeing, to keep on thinking the world is flat. Prescription education based on standardised testing can only reinforce prescriptive standard thinking and carry the culture over to the workplace.

3) Linked to this is the importance of language and metaphor in building pictures in keeping the door open. When we use metaphors - and still pictures of lock and key it starts to fix in our minds how we think stuff is working. When we describe the immune system as defence, we start to interpret its behaviour within that context, as well as then compartmentalise function. Much of our language in medicine and business is often war-like and compartmentalised, rather than collaborative and networked - though much of this is changing now with our digital landscape as we recognise the power of networks and collaboration in both science and business.

These are huge subjects in themselves, but I'd quite like to think aloud on them some other posts. Luca Turin is also involved in an interesting DARPA research project on scent detection, more on that later too.