Biomimicry: the nexus for achieving sustainability in the people-process-planet relationship (2024)

1.1. The industrial revolutions

The early man lived in harmony with the environment in which he found himself; hunting and gathering his food from the environment and making use of what was readily available within his vicinity: vegetation, stone, wood, animal, wind, sun, and water were his main sources of food and energy. As time progressed, man started to exploit and dominate his environment, and thus began the industrial revolutions. The discovery of metals led to the construction of machines, followed by the discovery of steam energy and electricity. This aided the transition from manual to mass production with an increase in the number of processing industries. Man was mastering his environment and advancing as evidenced in the different industrial revolutions [1], but not without deleterious effect on the environment. Natural resources were fast being depleted. The processing of these natural resources into finished products and services for man gave rise to air pollution, water pollution, land pollution and so many other types of pollution: the environment all living things depend on for survival, was being threatened. There seems to be no end in sight, because as population increases so does consumption of products and services. The world's population is currently 8 billion [2] and this is predicted to grow, though at a slowing rate (Fig. 1). Therefore, consumption which is currently responsible for 60–80% of the earth's environmental degradation [3] will rise, leading to more resource depletion, and environmental degradation. The fourth industrial revolution brought in the information age, with smart industries using the concepts of Internet of Things, Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, to revolutionize the workplace, with increased efficiency and productivity but having deleterious effects on humans [4,5] as robots replace human jobs, an unnatural phenomenon.

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Fig. 1

Estimate of world population and growth rate [2].

The word ‘robot’ was coined from a 1920 play, Rossum's Universal Robots, R.U.R, in which human machines (robots) perform tasks for man. However, the last act of the play showed the robots revolting against their human creator: coming events, is said to always, cast their shadows before they occur. Not only has robotics increased productivity in the workplace, but it has also helped in increasing the rate at which resources are being depleted and the planet polluted.

The industrial revolutions are as a result of man using his scientific knowledge to exploit and adapt nature to his aspirations and inclinations, and this has come with a lot of benefits, but with a cost: depletion of natural resources, as man is exploiting and consuming resources from the environment at a rate much faster than these resources can be replenished; in processing these resources into finished product and services for the benefit of man, a lot of toxic substances are released into the same environment man needs for his survival. At the end-of-life of these products, or when they become obsolete, and are ‘unwanted’, they are disposed of as waste, which has and is still creating a humongous solid waste issue with its attendant environmental problems. Man has indeed, impacted on his planet, howbeit, negatively, and the planet is no longer sustainable, man has become a victim of his own revolutions.

1.2. The process industry

The process industry is key to man's survival on earth: it exploits raw materials from the environment and processes them to services and products for the benefit of man. This industry includes industries such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, petrochemical, paper and pulp, textile, steel, plastic, glass, mining, cement, paint, detergent, fertilizer, to mention a few. The process industry and the industrial revolutions are closely intertwined, with each driving and benefiting from the other's advancement: what was once manual labour was transformed to machine-based production, later, fully automated, and computerized industry, and now a smart, digitized and highly interconnected, data driven, internet-based industry.

1.3. The process industry, industrial revolution, and the sustainability of the planet

In all these revolutions, it is paramount to take into cognizance the burden bearing capacity of the planet, as it is now obvious that the planet is bulging under the weight of man's industrial revolutions. To ensure the survival and wellbeing of the planet and her people for generations to come, Rockstrom et al. [6] and Steffen [7] proposed a framework that consists of 9 planetary boundaries (Fig. 2) within which man must operate, of which the first four are already beyond their critical threshold [[8], [9], [10]] as shown in Table 1.

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Fig. 2

The nine planetary boundaries.

Similarly, the United Nations, concerned about the survival of the next generation, at its September 2015 summit, came up with 17 sustainable development goals, SDGs (Fig. 3), to help transform our current planet, and make it sustainable before 2030.

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Fig. 3

United Nation's 17 sustainable development goals [11].

1.4. Achieving sustainability in the process industry: past to present

To minimize the negative impact of the process industry on the planet, different strategies have been proposed, the main ones being: lean manufacturing, process intensification and modularization, and industrial ecology. Lean manufacturing is based on the Japanese way of production and pioneered by Toyota [12]. It seeks to eliminate waste within the production process while at the same time maximizing production. It is a thinking process that understands, and then identifies what value is, and what activities and resources are necessary to create that value. Once this is established, everything else is waste and must be eliminated. This identified value must also be generated in as rapid a flow as possible, from raw material to finished product, to prevent the buildup of waste. Waste elimination is also achieved by pulling the product flow from demand. Process intensification (via modularization) seeks to improve the manufacturing process by developing techniques that will reduce equipment volume, and the number of operations required to achieve a desired production objective. This ultimately leads to a reduction in capital cost, operating cost, energy consumption, environmental impact, and safer plants. As it happened in the Communications-Information-Telecommunication (CIT) industry, the process industry, will become increasingly miniaturized and highly efficient. Process intensification makes small scale modular manufacturing possible, and instead of having a big manufacturing plant in one location, modules can be placed at different locations [13]. Industrial ecology - according to Commoner's 4 laws of ecology [14]: everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. These laws of ecology are best depicted by the biogeochemical cycles of nature. Carbon is one of the big 6 macronutrients essential for all organisms: it combines with hydrogen and oxygen to form carbohydrates; with nitrogen, it forms proteins; phosphorus is the energy element of the cells; calcium, the structure element, and sodium and potassium are elements for nerve signal transmission. To ensure the ever-availability of these chemicals which make life on earth possible, nature recycles them within its geographical features (atmosphere, water, rocks, and soil). Fig. 4 shows a basic carbon cycle flow diagram.

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Fig. 4

Basic carbon cycle flow diagram.

As living and non-living organisms in the natural ecosystems interact one with another, industrial ecology seeks to imitate this and encourages industries to do same. Industrial ecology is the transfer of ‘methods’ from the biogeochemical cycles of nature to the industrial setting. The concept of industrial ecology can be said to date back to pre-1980 when Frosh and Gallopoulos [15] proposed the idea of industrial systems being made to behave like an ecosystem, where the waste of a specie is the resource to another specie, thus reducing the use of raw materials, pollution, and saving on the waste that has to be treated or disposed of.

1.5. Sustainability

The singular purpose of the three strategies: lean manufacturing, process intensification and industrial ecology, is the sustainability of the planet and that of the process industries which both exist for the benefit of the people. Sustainability has been defined by the Brundtland report [16] as the ability to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Liverman et al. [17] further defined sustainability as the indefinite survival of the human species through the maintenance of basic life support systems (air, water, land, biota) and the existence of infrastructure and institutions which distribute and protect the components of these systems.” Just as a stool requires a minimum of three legs for stability, the sustainability stool (Fig. 5) can only be stabilized by: economic viability for the industry - Profit oriented, environmental protection - Planet oriented, and social equity – People oriented, the 3Ps of sustainability. The process industry can be seen to be the seat that holds the three legs of the stool together, in that, its inputs and outputs are both from and to the environment, for the benefit of the people, and it must run profitably for its survival.

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Fig. 5

See Also

Science Trek - Science TrekThe Power Of Nature: Biomimicry | Quality GurusBiomimicry: Revolutionising the Built Industry for a Sustainable FutureHow Nature Inspires Creativity - Getaway Journal

The sustainability stool.

3.1. Biomimicry in optimization

In the design of products and processes, there are always so many alternatives to choose from and optimization helps to find the best solution that achieves maximum profit, minimum production cost, minimum environmental impacts, minimum use of resources, and maximum yield. One of the most effective and common methods used to solve process optimization problems is the golden section method, a line search method for one dimensional, unimodal, and non-differentiable objective functions. This method was inspired by nature's golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, believed to be the underlying geometry of spiral things ubiquitous in nature (Fig. 7). This sequence and ratio has also been utilized by user interface and graphic designers to create visually appealing displays to draw the attention of consumers [22].

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Fig. 7

The Fibonacci sequence in nature, aka the golden spiral. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

Left to right, top to bottom: seed pattern of sunflower, leaves on an aloe vera plant, sea shell, galaxies, the Fibonacci sequence, seed pattern of dandelion, a full cycle of the DNA molecule has a ratio of length to width of 1.619, uncurling fern (same for millipede), and hurricane [23].

Over the years a lot of biomimetic optimization algorithms have been developed. These methods are not as deterministic as the conventional methods and they have been found to be more effective in solving complex and challenging problems that could not be handled by the conventional methods [24,25]. Some of these algorithms and their sources of inspirations are given in Table 2 and are attestations to the fact that there are a lot to learn from nature.

3.2. Biomimicry in energy conservation, efficiency, and environmental performance

Harman [26] devised an impeller, which was originally designed as a propeller for boats, for use in water storage tanks of municipal water and wastewater treatment plants. This impeller, termed the lily impeller, was inspired by nature's ubiquitous spiral shape (Fig. 7) and the calla lily (Fig. 8). The lily impeller with a height of 8 inches circulates hundreds of millions of gallons of water with the same energy footprint as a light bulb, thus reducing energy usage by 80%, noise reduction by 75%, and reducing the use of disinfectants, to treat stagnant water, by 85%.

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Fig. 8

The calla lily, and the inspired lily impeller [27].

The self-Cleansing paint, Lotusan inspired by the hydrophobic and dust resistant rough surface of the Lotus flower [28] was found to be more favourable than conventional paints, both in terms of economic and environmental performance [29].

Cypris Materials [30] inspired by the wings of morpho butterflies, produced paint whose vibrant colours are obtained by nanostructures, made from synthetic polymers. These nanostructures can manipulate and reflect light wavelengths. This technology avoids the use of toxic pigments and dyes, and the solar reflective coating gives an added advantage of significant savings in energy by reducing cooling cost.

Wu et al. [31,32] drew inspiration from plants to create an artificial photosynthesis process to use the excess CO₂ in the atmosphere to generate energy. The process uses cuprous oxide as a catalyst to produce methanol as shown in Fig. 9.

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Fig. 9

CO₂ reduction to methanol by photocatalysis.

Novomer [33], a company has also designed a photosynthesis-inspired catalyst that combines CO₂ and limonene (which can be extracted from waste citrus peels) at low temperatures to make biodegradable polycarbonates.

3.3. Biomimicry in water management - the Aquaweb

The process industry uses a lot of water and can take a cue from the Aquaweb. Since world population growth, has shown in Fig. 1, will lead to increase in food demand and its domino effect on freshwater withdrawal for agricultural purposes, a water challenge was envisaged for the future. Team Nexloop, who won the 2017 Ray of Hope prize of the Biomimicry Institute [55] designed a water management system, the Aquaweb (Fig. 10), that draws its inspiration from the works of various researchers: the ability of the cribellate spider, Uloborus Walckenaerium, to capture and direct water from the atmosphere [56]; the water storage technique of the ice plant in surface bladder-like cells [57,58]; the distribution of resources among plants by a fungal network present in the soil [59]; and the hexagonal shape of the beehive which gives it its extraordinary structural strength such that a comb made of 40g of wax and 37cm×22.5cm in size holds about 1.8kg of honey [60]. These natural cues are shown in Fig. 11.

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Fig. 10

The AquaWeb [61].

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Fig. 11

Nature's inspiration for the AquaWeb–Spider web captures water and directs to centre [62], ice plant surface stores water [63], fungal network distributes nutrients to plants [64] and the strong hexagonal shape of the beehive [65].

The Aquaweb captures water from the air, stores and distributes the water saving on water and energy cost.

3.4. Biomimicry for resource conservation and recovery

The process industry is the chief culprit of inefficient use of nature's resources and environmental pollution leading to unsustainable development. To meet the needs and wants of man, industries exploit the earth for raw materials which are transformed into products and services for man. During the process of transformation, a lot of ‘unwanted materials’ are generated and because they are unwanted, they are discharged to either the air, water bodies or land. Initially, the earth, using its self-cleansing mechanism could cope with these discharges, but the rate at which man is discharging these unwanted materials far exceeds the earth's cleansing capacity. Man has impacted the earth, the earth is sick and is now impacting on man. There is, therefore, a need to emulate nature's strategies, discovered by Benyus [18] and discussed in Ajayi [1] which nature has used to survive these 3.5 billion years of its existence.

Commoner [14] observed that everything in nature is connected to everything else and everything must go somewhere, and this was depicted in the carbon cycle of Fig. 2. Observing nature's processing systems, they all operate cyclically in a closed loop manner, whereas the process industry operates in a linear, open loop format as shown in Fig. 12. This format is not only destructive to the earth as it exploits and depletes limited resources, but also pollutes the earth through its numerous points of discharges of waste to the environment. This is not so with nature, who has practically zero waste, as everything is recycled in a materially closed system. Humans seem to be the only organism on planet earth that produce ‘waste’ that is not useful for something else. There is a need to draw inspiration from the sustainable cycles of nature and close the loop - interacting one with another, taking less from the environment and discharging less to the environment. To achieve this, El-Haggar [66] proposed the 7Rs to innovation: regulations as a tool for enforcement, reducing to minimize the waste generated from source, reusing to find another use for the waste, recycling to use waste as raw materials for other products, recovery to generate material or energy from waste, rethinking and renovating as alternatives to disposal for any inevitable and unmanageable waste that still exist. The Kalundborg story, though not initially set out to demonstrate industrial ecology, closes the loop and is an excellent attestation to the effectiveness of industrial ecology.

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Fig. 12

Industry's linear/open loop system.

3.4.1. The Kalundborg story

The collaboration between the enterprises in Kalundborg developed spontaneously over five decades. In 1959, Denmark's 1500MW coal fired power plant, Asnaes Power Station (now Dong Energy) produced power for Kalundborg's 4500 households and other industries in the estate using underground water. NovoNordisk and Novozymes were pharmaceutical industries producing almost 50% of the world's supply of insulin and industrial enzymes. In 1961 Statoil (then Esso) refinery started operation and used water from lake Tisso. In 1972 Gyproc, a gypsum plasterboard company used waste gas from the statoil refinery for drying its plasterboard. In 1973 Asnaes stopped the use of underground water and connected to Statoil's water pipe. The status of the Kalundborg collaboration as of 1975 is shown in Fig. 13. After a period, Asnaes produced steam for Novo Nordisk, Novozymes and Statoil refinery, gypsum for Gyproc from its flue gas desulphurization plant, excess heat in its cooling water was sent to the municipality and to the fish farm, and most of its fly-ash was used by the cement company. Statoil made enough fertilizer for Denmark from its desulphurization plant. The status of the Kalundborg collaboration in 2011 is shown in Fig. 14.

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Fig. 13

The collaboration in Kalundborg as at 1975 (adapted from Saikkuu [67]).

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Fig. 14

Kalundborg collaboration status as at 2011 [70].

The collaboration between industries in Kalundborg resulted in reduction of resource consumption, and remarkable cutback in environmental pollution: in a year, CO₂ emissions reduced by 635,000 tons, waste exchange comprised some 2.9 million tons of materials, collective water consumption reduced by 3.6 million m³ (25%), the power station reduced its water use by 60% through recycling and 100GWh of energy was saved [68]. As at 2015.

Novo Nordisk and Novozymes converted 330,000 tons of spent yeast to fertilizer for 50,000 acres, and biogas for 6000 homes. The savings for the collaborating industries was in the tune of $27 million [69]. Just as nature recycles everything, rewards cooperation, banks on diversity, demands on local expertise, and curbs excess from within, the Kalundborg collaboration, where one company's waste became the resource for another, proves that emulating these principles of nature in our process industries will go a long way in resource conservation and pollution prevention thus ensuring a sustainable environment.

3.5. Biomimicry and process (chemical) engineering

The main responsibility of the process industry is the transformation of raw materials to finished products for the benefit of mankind, and the chemical (process) engineering profession is responsible for the development, designing and operation of these processing industries. A major challenge for the profession is the ability to combine environmental friendliness and profitability when designing these processes and products. Coppens [71] echoed Benyus concept of biomimicry in recommending Nature Inspired Chemical Engineering (NICE), as the way to go for sustainable process engineering, where nature is seen as a rich reference to design new sustainable products, processes, and services, thus ensuring a sustainable future. In line with this new paradigm, University College London, in 2013, established a centre for nature inspired engineering and in 2014 an elective course, Nature Inspired Chemical Engineering (NICE) was introduced into the chemical engineering curriculum [72]. Gerbaud et al. [73] also summarises recent nature-inspired chemical engineering processes.

5.1. Identifying and understanding the complex biological systems

One of the biggest challenges in implementing biomimicry in the process industry is identifying and understanding the complex biological systems that could serve as inspiration for new technologies. This requires a deep understanding of biological processes and systems, as well as expertise in the relevant engineering fields to translate these biological processes to technical processes. It is also important that biomimicry research be conducted in an ethical and morally responsible manner.

5.2. Developing new materials

Many biological systems rely on unique materials that are not yet available in synthetic form. There will therefore be a need to develop new materials, albeit using the principles of biomimicry, that can mimic the properties of these natural materials.

5.3. Scaling up production

Many biomimetic technologies that have been developed are still in the prototype stage and have not been scaled up for large-scale production. There is the need to develop scale-up processes for these technologies.

5.4. Balancing performance and sustainability

Biomimetic technologies often perform well, but they may not always be the most sustainable option. Researchers will need to balance performance and sustainability to create technologies that are both effective and environmentally friendly.

5.5. Collaborating across disciplines

Biomimicry requires collaboration across a range of disciplines, including biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Researchers will need to work together to develop new technologies that integrate knowledge from these fields.

5.6. Educating and training the next generation

Biomimicry is a relatively new field, and there is a need to educate and train the next generation of researchers in this area. This includes developing new curricula and training programs that incorporate biomimicry principles and practices.

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