The Blue Economy: Green 2.0

From organic food to ecologically certified products, every day the world finds a new way Go Green. The inherent contradiction of “green consumption” is drawing increasing criticism from skeptics, but few have offered as many concrete alternatives to mainstream greenness as the folks at the Blue Economy. Blue, it turns out, is the new Green. Or, as they put it, Green 2.0.

The basic idea has been around a long time: Don’t tweek the existing system by putting green labels on things or selling carbon offsets to compensate for burning oil. Rearrange the system so it turns waste into products and makes logical of natural resources. The book Cradle to Cradle elegantly summed up this manifesto with a broad look at how to reformulate construction, engineering, and design from the bottom up rather than retrofitting a wasteful system.

What I enjoy about the Blue Economy that I found lacking in Cradle to Cradle are the specific, concrete examples of how this is already happening. One projects takes low-value mixed-stream plastic and turns them into vegetable crates that can replace the wooden ones used in farmers’ markets – the latter are quaint and natural looking but they involve cutting down trees. Another describes a South African chicken farmer whose animal feed comes from beach seaweed, maggots grown at a slaughterhouse, fish too small for fisherman to sell and rotting bananas. Yet another involves using the leftover biomass from coffee in the cultivation of shitake mushrooms.

These are ideas that make sense to me. Natural systems are infinitely more efficient than human societies because they don’t have waste. Our own systems, particularly in the 20^th century, helped us blur the distinction between something that doesn’t have value and something that doesn’t happen to have value right now, which resulted in an exponential multiplication of trash. There’s a tendency to stir up moral outrage about the piles of festering garbage sitting in eternally expanding landfills, releasing methane into the air and dripping toxic leachate into the groundwater. I think we need another way of looking at them – they’re a waste of money.

The Blue Economy website is worth glancing at. Its setup is a bit awkward with a required registration to see the content and the text often comes in a slightly clumsy translation from what appears to be German. I still recommend it for good ideas about how to turn traditional Green thinking on its head.