The Checklist: Metrics of “Think Different”
THE 7 CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL IDEAS & THE CIRCULARITY DIVIDEND
This is the last of three posts on different ways to get to better answers faster.
Part 1: Integrative Design, a methodology, and Negawatts, a framework for assessing benefits across value chains
Part 2: The metaphors of Peripheral Vision and the Theory of the Adjacent Possible for assessing and leveraging insights
Part 3: The 7 Characteristics of Successful Ideas, a heuristic; the Circular Dividend, the transformational impact of doing different
The 7 Characteristics of (Better) Successful Ideas
The 7 Characteristics (7Cs) is a shortcut I developed to size up companies, technologies, business models, practices and policies, particularly those relevant to clean energy and materials. The checklist is useful for assessing startups, but also for analyzing how existing products, services, models, practices and policies might be improved.
I had assumed the more boxes checked the better. Then I discovered SHEIN, a fast fashion company that checks every single 7C box but trashes the environment and rides roughshod over basic human rights. SHEIN is not a better idea, but it is a wildly successful company, with plans for an IPO valued at more than $60 billion. The 7C metrics work as a rapid diagnostic to assess prospects, but not as a measure of ethics.
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If you have played with Lego® bricks, the first six Cs will look familiar.
Small
Modular
Flexible
Adaptable
Scalable
Cheap at the unit cost
These are about limiting risk and costs. The bets are smaller, so if something doesn’t work, or work as well as it might, it is easier to make adjustments.
A microgrid is a good example of a 6C idea. It is made up small, modular components, which can include solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells, batteries and even diesel generators. The components are interchangeable within the overall system, so a microgrid is flexible. It is adaptable, designed run on its own, separate from the big grid during a power outage (“island”). A microgrid can be configured for a building, a farm, or a neighborhood, so it is adaptable in its deployment as well. And it can scale up either by adding more components to an individual microgrid, or by stringing together a series of microgrids.
The seventh C—“Riffable”—is a nod to jazz. A riff deconstructs a melody to build a new melody. New notes can be added, too, which can take the melody in an entirely different direction.
Riffability is the freedom to experiment with different materials, to tweak processes and try new combinations of technologies and business models; changes that can lead to all sorts of serendipitous benefits.
RIFFING MUSHROOMS
Mycocycle is a Chicago-based startup specializing in construction waste that checks all seven boxes. The company has developed a process to break down and detoxify waste (gypsum, wood, rubber, asphalt, carpets) in as little as two weeks using fungal mycelia (mushroom roots). The result are bricks of transformed material that are naturally fire and water resistant, lightweight and with impressive thermal properties. The bricks are then ground up and used as ingredients to make new materials.
The process is low heat (so also low emissions) because it biological: too much heat and mycelia die. Heat is used to stop the growth of mycelia at the end the process, but overall this is an extremely energy efficient operation. If the energy is sourced from solar, wind, or fuel cells, there are virtually no emissions at all.
Mycocycle units can be set up as portable mini-factories in shipping containers, providing the flexibility to locate where needed, including construction and demolition sites. The number of mini-factories can be increased or decreased as needed. Mycocycle can also set up operations as a permanent central processing facility.
Another kind of flexibility—financial—comes from two dovetailing income streams—waste removal services and ingredients to make new building materials.
Some of the ways Mycocycle riffs, or could riff:
Calcium carbonate sourced from treated waste could be used in addition to or even as a replacement for limestone to make cement. The high heat process of extracting calcium carbonate from limestone releases a significant amounts of CO2 , so this switch would reduce emissions from the production of cement.
The company’s stretch goal is to make Nylon 6 from treated waste. Nylon 6 is a plastic used in everything from carpets and upholstery to clothing and tires. At scale, Mycocycle Nylon 6 could cut demand for the fossil feedstocks (oil and gas) used to make virgin Nylon 6. This means more oil and gas left in the ground; fewer drilling rigs, pipelines, and tankers. In turn, fewer wells means less methane to “flare off” from wellheads; fewer chances for oil spills and gas leaks.
According to founder and CEO Joanne Rodriguez, every ton of waste treated “reduces CO2 emission by almost three metric tons.” In five years, she predicts Mycocycle will process 1.5 million tons of waste annually, which translates to a CO2 reduction of more than four megatons. To put that in perspective, Climeworks, the leader in Direct Air Capture, hopes to achieve the removal of a single megaton of CO2 by 2030.
Like many next gen materials companies, Mycocycle provides urgently needed “poly-answers” at a time of polycrisis. Why solve for X when you can also solve for Y and Z?
The Circularity Dividend: Metric of Transformation
Circularity is having a moment. There are Circularity conferences, podcasts, initiatives, consultancies, accelerators and pledges. It is the word that launched a thousand McKinsey white papers and Davos breakout sessions. Even ExxonMobil, arch villain of the “take, make, waste” linear economy, writes position papers on Circularity.
Yet twenty-five years ago, Circularity was an edge idea in search of a metaphor.
HISTORY
In 2002, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart published Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, imagining “a world of industry that made children the standard of safety.” Building on the work of Walter Stahel (credited with coining the term cradle to cradle to cradle) and Genevieve Reday whose 1976 report to the European Commission sketched out the basic ideas of what would become Circularity, McDonough and Braungart rejected the inevitability of a cradle to grave business model where waste was simply part of the process. They looked to nature, a waste-free, self-renewing system that creates bounty without poisoning itself, for inspiration. With green chemistry and a systems-driven approach to design, they argued, there is no reason to settle for “less bad” answers that reduce but don’t eliminate pollution.
They focused on material streams, dividing them into two categories: Biological (anything hunted, gathered or farmed) and Technological (anything dredged, mined or pumped). The goal was to keep each cycling within its stream. Ideally, all things Biological would eventually break down into Earth-friendly beneficial nutrients, while products made from Technological materials would be upcycled (aka “adaptive reuse”) to make new products. “Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed for recycling,” they warned. (For example, recycling plastic bottles into upholstery may require additional chemicals and also heat, undermining the environmental benefits of the new product.)
Crade to Cradle was a call to action inspired by Rachel Carson’s warning forty years earlier in 1962 of an impending Silent Spring, a world so thoroughly poisoned by petrochemicals that not a single bird was left to sing. Although Carson’s main target, the pesticide DDT, was banned in the US in 1972, by then thousands of other harmful chemicals had infiltrated every nook and cranny of daily life. Clothing, furniture, toys, electronics, pots, pans, shampoo, lotions, cars, buildings, food—everything we touched, used, occupied or ate was a “product plus,” explained McDonough and Braungart:
“ …(A)s a buyer you got the item or service you wanted, plus additives that you didn’t ask for and didn’t know were included and that may be harmful to you and your loved ones. (Maybe shirt labels should read: Product contains toxic dyes and catalysts. Don’t work up a sweat or they will leach onto your skin.) Moreover, these extra ingredients may not be necessary to the product itself…”
In 2010, inspired by the Cradle to Cradle vision, Ellen MacArthur, a competitive sailor who rose to fame circumnavigating the globe, launched a foundation to promote what was by then starting to be known as the Circular Economy. She drew a parallel between her experience sailing solo in vast and sometimes angry seas and humanity’s voyage into the future in a world with limited resources:
“…You enter a different mode when you head out there. Your boat is your entire world. And what you take with when you leave is all you have…No experience in my life could have given me a better definition of finite. What we have out there is all we have. …Our global economy is not different. It is entirely dependent on finite materials.”
This is the epiphany of Carl Sagan’s elegy, Pale Blue Dot, published 16 years earlier.
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam… The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand…”
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) has since become an international, go-to resource for all things Circularity, while Circularity has become the go-to term for all things environmentally good: sustainability, resilience, the energy transition, energy efficiency, net zero, green chemistry, regenerative agriculture, nature-based solutions, the blue economy, low-carbon manufacturing, recycling, right-to-repair laws, remanufacturing and returnable plastic cups—anything and everything that bends or breaks the line of “take, make, waste.”
As defined by the EMF, the three core principles of Circularity are:
It has been a remarkably rapid paradigm shift. Circularity is seen as essential to keep the world from a worst case climate-wrecked future. It isn’t only a matter of finding ways to do more with less, but also doing better with what we have. In 25 years, there will be 25% more of us, a global population approaching 10 billion. Demand for everything is only going up.
THE CIRCULARITY DIVIDEND
The Circularity Dividend is systems level transformation. The circles of Circularity—the businesses, organizations, communities and sectors that embrace the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra—are making a difference. But the big pay-off, the key to flipping the switch on the “take, make, waste” linear model, will come from a combination of consequences and connections: the financial benefits of more efficient business models (e.g, don’t pollute and avoid clean up costs) and the variety and number of ways circles stitch together. These connections can be arcs, loops, spirals, dovetails or links.
The Theory of the Adjacent Possible applies (see Part 2). Each innovation, or combination of innovations, opens doors to the next round. The more Circularity, the more Circularity is possible and the greater the aggregate impact. At critical mass, Circularity becomes unstoppable: the edge idea is now business as usual.
Arcs, loops, spirals, dovetails and links are nature’s playbook for building waste-free, self-renewing, bountiful, vital, resilient systems, the Cradle to Cradle benchmark. From micro to macro and back again, water, nutrients and minerals cycle through life forms, creating a rich tangle of interconnected relationships and ecosystems nested like Russian matryoshka dolls. The most productive ecosystems are those with the most connections and the most biodiversity: tropical rainforests and coral reefs. The most vulnerable ecosystems are those with the fewest connections and the least biodiversity: monoculture crops and clear cut forests.
The Circularity Dividend, big D, is made up of many smaller dividends, each a series of connections that can meander in any direction, but all leading to the same place: a healthier, more equitable and prosperous world.
An Exercise in Small d
Let’s jump ahead a few years and imagine that Mycocycle has now ramped up production of its low emissions / low heat calcium carbonate product to the point where it is a viable, cost-competitive, drop-in ready alternative to calcium carbonate sourced from limestone. What might a Circularity dividend, small d, look like?
Calcium carbonate is the key ingredient in cement, which in turn is the key ingredient in concrete, the mostly widely used construction material in the world. Reducing the carbon footprint of concrete would help slow climate change. The Mycocycle product requires no mines, mining equipment or transport of heavy rock, so there would also be fewer emissions from mining and transport. CO2 emissions from the high heat / high emissions process required to extract calcium carbonate from limestone would also be eliminated. Mycocycle’s distributed production model could also shorten the supply chain by co-locating mini-factories near cement plants, further reducing transport costs and emissions.
Now, combine lower emission concrete made from Mycocycle cement with architectural 3D printing, a technology quickly progressing from edge to mainstream. Homes built using massive 3D printers that squirt perfect layers of concrete can save time, money and materials compared to traditional wood frame “stick built” construction. These homes are better able to withstand extreme weather and fire, making them a better fit for a climate-changed world, with the potential to lower insurance premiums. 3D printing also generates less construction waste.
Now, combine 3D printed homes made from low emissions concrete with Passive House design, an approach that optimizes energy and water efficiency, reducing utility bills. Designing for efficiency (in Circularity terms, reducing waste) spins off into its own series of rippling small d dividends.
For example, one of RMI co-founder Amory Lovins’ favorite examples of how design can trigger a cascade of beneficial impacts involves plumbing. Conventional skinny pipes with lots of bends and 90° elbow joints require a great deal of energy to overcome friction to pump liquids. Reconfiguring pipes to be fatter and straighter with joints or 30° to 45° (a biomimic of a deciduous tree) reduces friction as much as 90%. Much smaller motors using much less energy can do the job. At least half of all the electricity generated goes toward powering pumps, so reconfiguring pipes can have a profound impact on energy demand.
“…Every unit of friction you save in the pipe will save 10 units of coal and cost and pollution and global “weirding” at the power plant. Also, as you go back upstream, each component gets smaller, simpler and cheaper progressively, so you save on capital costs as well… —Amory Lovins, Autodesk lecture
In sum, the dividend that began with Mycocyle and wound its way to reconfigured plumbing includes reduced chemical pollution, fewer CO2 emissions, less construction waste, more homes that are less expensive to build and operate (lower insurance, energy and water costs), and possibly fewer central power plants.
Another small d dividend could start with Mycocycle Nylon 6 (still in development), then arc, loop, spiral, dovetail and link through the construction, textile, carpet and furnishings industries.
There are already thousands of small d dividends, with more emerging every day. The more Circularity, the more dividends are possible. In nature, the number and variety of connections correlates to the strength and resilience of an ecosystem. At critical mass, small d dividends, this dense tangle of arcs, loops, spirals, dovetails and links, marks the transformation of an economic system.
The Circularity Dividend, the big D aggregate of all the small d’s, is a thriving, livable planet, the only metric that really matters.
Think different. Then do different. The world can change for the better faster than you might imagine.