ZERI? What is ZERI I hear you ask. Is it zero in italian? Is it one of those wierd Japanese manga characters with the huge mouths and unreasonable eyes? Well, no, though they do suffer from being at end of any index. If you were to choose a company name the logic is to call it Aardvark or AA.
I’ll put you out of your misery. ZERI is the Zero Emission Research and Initiatives. Basically it’s a bunch of scientists doing good while they walk the earth like the Hulk’s David Banner. I say that because in the humble opinion of your commentator they’re green and they’re going to be huge.
ZERI’s leading man is a guy called Gunther Pauli. He was the guy behind the environmentally friendly detergent called Ecover, which is big in Europe. The green features of Ecover’s Headquarters reads like an environmentalist wrote a letter to Santa. In short he was a big success.
Then Gunther gave it all up and started ZERI.
What ZERI does is build systems, in this case Integrated Waste Management Systems. The rationale behind this is to design systems that work in harmony with nature. Distilled down to its essence it’s the idea that anything which is an organic waste will be food to something, and that’s those somethings will create value. if you’re poor and competing against a multinational you can’t afford to waste anything. Additionally by ensuring zero waste emissions it’s stopping environmental pollution at source.
I’m amazed by ZERI since it works within markets to make poor farmers from Brazil competitive with huge agrocorps whose actions are grinding small farmers down into the dirt. I would love to see ZERI combined with the Toyota Production System, which also believes in ZERO Waste, which also believes in adding value to products and people and never fires lays off an employee when the market ain’t buying.
I recently sat through what amounted to a small agricultural conference with people who work in agriculture in Asian Countries. I read their reports and literature and it makes for pretty dismal reading I can tell you. I’m a layman and a generalist. The title of the conference was Green Productivity and Organic Rice Farming. Not one of them mentioned Terra Preta, not one of them talked about Glomalin, indeed when I mentioned it to a soil scientist she’d never heard of it.
A Phillipine Agricultural Magazine had an article on a machine that can be used to burn rice husks in the open to address safety issues. I was stunned that they would do this. LPG costs are going through the roof in the Phillipines and wastefully burning what amounts to a fuel is insane. Rice Husks, the millions of tons produced each year in South Asia can be used in a furnace providing essentially free cooking heat for poor people and creating char for terra preta in the process.
They also had an article talking about farmers getting hurt by stepping on the plough shattered shells of snails and being infected with all sorts of tropical diseases the snails carry, mostly flukes and the like. The article had a paragraph on the chemicals that could be used to control snails. it didn’t mention that these chemicals are priced well beyond the reach of peasant farmers. It took me 90 seconds online to find a better solution; the Soaptree. it grows in Kenya. It has berries which is used as a natural detergent, which explains the name. This natural detergent also kills snails and only snails and has been used for hundreds of years. So planted in rice growing areas it would allow farmers to make their own detergent for washing their clothes, meaning they wouldn’t need to buy it from the shop and the simple act of washing clothes would wipe out the snails in their rice fields without affecting their rice crop. Three birds with the one stone – no purchase, clean clothes, no injuries. The tree would also provide animal fodder or compost material. If I researched further I am sure I could find other ways to utilise it.
A lot of people are really not thinking about multi-functionality in systems, nor are they doing even minimal research. ZERI, however does think about multifunctionality in systems, does its research, and so in my opinion are about 2-3 steps ahead of the experts I so recently encountered. Better lives and a better planet; what could be better than that?
I’ll talk a little about one ZERI project in my next post.
