While the ZERI and permaculture trainings were for us equally empowering, we imagine that a combination of the two, the way they fit hand-in-glove, dovetailing ideas and actions into a coherent path for the future, could be very exciting.

A brief history of ZERI follows the path of Gunter Pauli. He graduated in Economics from Loyola University in Belgium and obtained his masters in business administration from INSEAD (the premier European business school) in France. Under his leadership in 1992, Ecover developed the first biodegradable detergent using palm oil. The new Ecover factory built in Belgium was a marvel of the time, incorporating a grass roof for heating and cooling with solar and wind-powered water treatment systems. The company also addressed the social and cultural health of its employees, offering bicycles to all, bonuses for carpooling, and frequent company activities and events.

As Gunter delved more deeply into the concept of sustainability he realized that creating a product that cleaned up one part of the world, Europe, while devastating another part, the tropical rainforest (source of the palm oil), was not a sustainable model. After much soul searching, he decided to leave Ecover in 1994 to found ZERI, a non-profit organization. ZERI is devoted to practical approaches to meeting humanity's needs for water, food, energy, jobs, shelter and more—in an environmentally sustainable manner—byapplying science and technology and involving government, business, and academia. In a nutshell, ZERI is systems design for sustainability.

This article is an exploration of the five ZERI design principles—what ZERI calls "Nature's Design Principles" derived from the five kingdoms of nature (bacteria, algae, animals, fungi, and plants)—and the five-step ZERI Business Methodology used to evaluate and plan potential businesses or projects.

Since it is much easier to grasp design principles in the context of a real-life example, we will describe two case studies to understand what ZERI brings to the table and to give readers a brief overview of how permaculture and ZERI can be used in concert.

Colombian coffee growers

In the 1990s, Colombian coffee growers experienced a real decline in their standard of living even while earning a premium over coffees from other countries. It occurred because there was a glut of coffee on the global market. The decline in living standards led the coffee growers to try many other means to raise their incomes: Some switched to growing organic coffee. Some razed their coffee plantations to grow beef, but the land would only support two cattle per hectare (1 hectare = 2.47 acres.)

The plight of Colombian coffee growers coincided with the early years of ZERI and attracted the attention of Gunter and his network of scientists and practitioners. A major factor in the lowered standard of living was that the coffee growers were operating from the old core-business model—coffee was the one and only product. Of the total biomass of a coffee plant, only 4%ends up in the beans—the final product. How could one expect to make money when 96% of what Nature produces is wasted? So, each year as the coffee bushes are trimmed, that waste represents an opportunity to add value to the enterprise—a value above and beyond the value of the core product.

To enhance the income from coffee, two parts of the system were changed. First bananas were over planted to create a higher quality, shade-grown coffee. Organic growing techniques were adopted, so herbs were planted to attract beneficial insects for pest control. This gave the growers the ability to charge more for their coffee and resulted in two additional products—dried bananas and dried herbs—and increased the diversity of their system in the plant kingdom.

The first major concept that ZERI brings is an awareness of the five kingdoms of nature, after Lynn Margulis' book, Five Kingdoms. From the five kingdoms, ZERI derived "Nature's Five Design Principles," the first of which states that "Whatever is waste for one species in one kingdom is food for another species in another kingdom." What kingdom is particularly adept at feeding off of the waste from trees? Fungi. Feeding the slash from the annual trimming of the coffee plants to fungi—in particular Pleurotus ostreatus or oyster mushrooms—creates a high-value product which can be sold both locally and globally. Moreover, once the mycelium (the thin white strands of fungi that are the major "body" of fungi) have grown through the slash, they convert it from a mostly indigestible material to a highly nutritious animal feed from which both cows and pigs can thrive.

This introduces the animal kingdom. People eat the fruit of the mushrooms, and cows and pigs eat the enriched mushroom substrate once the mushrooms are harvested. The manure from the animals could be used as compost, but it has more value if it is used to feed anaerobic bacteria in a bio-digester. Enter the bacteria kingdom. The bio-digester produces methane, natural gas. This is burned to produce steam to pasteurize the slash from the coffee plants before it is inoculated with the mushroom spawn. Thus the bio-digester and the anaerobic bacteria which make it work together eliminate the need to buy gas for the pasteurization process. Meat from the cows and pigs is another value-added product for the coffee grower to sell locally. Finally, sludge from the bio-digester flows into a series of ponds in which algae grow; they purify the water and are eaten by fish—yet another local value-added product.

Colombian ZERI coffee plantations now offer a multi-product package consisting not only of coffee, but also dried oyster mushrooms, dried herbs, and dried bananas. The ZERI coffee plantation is now the low-cost producer and virtually immune to competition from multi-national corporations. Previously they had been buffeted by the vagaries of international coffee markets. Today, so much value is generated from the by-products of the process, that the price they receive for coffee is not so important. Product diversity assures a steady income in good coffee-growing years and bad.

This Colombian example makes use of a valuable tool created through the ZERI network and which is specifically the work of George Chan—"Integrated Farming and Waste Management System" (IF-WMS) (1). The ultimate goal of zero waste is the driving force behind these systems. Waste is always a resource in nature—and we must mimic her time-tested ways.

Nature's design principles

In the Colombian coffee growers example, we were primarily focused on the first of Nature's Design Principles (2):

1. Whatever is waste for one species in one kingdom is food for another species in another kingdom. A corollary is that if one species is fed its own waste, it will degenerate. We see this today as mad cow disease. (And see #3 below.)

We saw that the slash from the coffee plants was the perfect food for oyster mushrooms, and that the resulting enriched substrate provided a nutritionally balanced feed for cows and pigs. Their waste in turn fed the anaerobic bacteria in a bio-digester (producing methane) and the resulting sludge became food for algae—so all five kingdoms were needed to recycle all of the nutrients from the coffee tree slash.

The other four design principles are:

2.   Whatever is a toxin for a species in one kingdom is neutral or a nutrient, for at least one species belonging to another kingdom. Everything produced by nature is food for something—even toxic compounds. (But this is not necessarily so for waste produced by humans in their industrial processes.)

3.   Whenever there is a virus jeopardizing a species, it is harmless for species in at least 3 other kingdoms. Passing infected material (waste) through the other kingdoms provides a way of eliminating the infection. The opposite of this is what has created diseases like mad-cow—feeding animal waste to the same species of animal.

4.   The more diverse and local, the more efficient and resilient. The epitome of this is the thousands of seed banks once maintained by individual farmers. They stored seeds that were developed over centuries as those best suited to produce in their locality. This treasure has largely been lost—deliberately undermined by multi-national seed/bio-engineering companies. Their loss puts humanity at risk.

5.   Whenever species of all five kingdoms interact, the system will integrate and separate all matter at ambient temperature and pressure. This is an incredible capability. We are very good at putting things together—aseptic or "tetra" packaging, CDs, etc., but generally don't think of how the end product can be broken down for reuse or recycling. During our ZERI training we saw a video of an aseptic package (Like a juice container which consists of a layer of cardboard, a layer of aluminum foil and a layer of plastic all glued together) being "disassembled" by a solution containing members of all five kingdoms. The material was put in the solution, and it immediately began to come apart. Lichens (a symbiotic pairing of algae and fungi) were one of the main ingredients in this "bioliquid." They can extend very narrow filaments only two microns wide up to a mile or two a daythrough rock.

The Durango Eco-Park project

Business clustering is one area where ZERI goes further than our permaculture business and economics training. The notion of business clusters invokes the principles of systems design for strategic business planning.

One of the homework assignments in our ZERI training was to complete a business plan for a proposed business or process using the five-step ZERI business methodology, including the business cluster concept. The five steps of this process are (3):

1.   Assemble total throughput models using input-output tables.

2.   Search these tables for potential value-added products or cost-savings.

3.   Model business clusters to exploit the system's elements.

4.   Identify breakthrough technologies.

5.   Identify or design industrial policies to support the business.

The concept behind the Durango Eco-Park project was to combine a set of businesses into one symbiotic system—each business generates a waste that is an input required by another—in a single location to facilitate those exchanges. This, of course, parallels the permaculture principle, "Integrate rather than segregate," placing elements in proximity for beneficial function.

There were five 'core' businesses included in this project:

•     Brew Pub

•     Bakery

•     Coffee Shop

•     Mushroom Grower

•     Greenhouse and Nursery