100% Sustainable

There was a lot in the last sentence, so let's unpack it a bit -- the protocols of nature can be summarised as being cyclic, solar and safe. That's cyclic as in materials is continually reused, solar as in being powered by the sun, and safe as in nothing toxic goes where it shouldn't. Industry has already been adopting these protocols to some extent, and most environmental legislation is derived from them.

Industry already forms an ecosystem of sorts -- interacting flows of materials and energy -- but it's not a particularly good one yet, as it is not self-sustaining, with open input and output loops. Outputs from industrial systems should become inputs for natural systems, to become integrated with them. At the moment they are poisonous rather than nutritious. However, with care and vision, the global industrial system can be redesigned to be 100% cyclic, solar and safe.

The beauty of cyclic|solar|safe is that it swiftly summarises the aspirational qualities that any product or process needs to have. It's also relatively easy to quantify, meaning that you can take a product, assess it and then see where you have to improve in order to bring that product system to 100%.

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