The Energy of Pooh....

For the previous several months I have been operating on the ground with a multidisciplinary staff of young medical doctors and technologies entrepreneurs hunting at progressive ways to control the vast quantities of waste we people deposit in our water provide.

Of program, due to the fact this is the remarkable 21^st Century, we discovered the “usual” publish dot.com miraculous things.

We can create sufficient electrical energy from human waste to energy cities.  We can clean up our water for pennies, not billions of dollars.

We can use novel genetic engineering and math to modify bacteria in our septic tanks to generate consuming water from sewage, mine more and more scarce minerals from our waste at higher profit, produce biogas to energy the sewage mining and purification processes, even mine precious metals from our pooh.

We could use the identical genetic engineering to recover industrial chemical compounds from the Maquiladora-saturated Rio Grande.

Genetically modified bacteria can “tune” sewage sludge to generate customized fertilizer that decreases the amount of irrigation water we require to develop the food we eat…and the thirty% we throw away.

Modified organisms can even execute the same profitable magic on that meals waste.  We really do not have to wait for the food to pass by way of our intestines to revenue from our world-class waste stream.

The Gemba of Pooh

All these discoveries and much more took place simply because our group has discovered from the most sustainable businesses like Toyota and Honda that the very best way to innovate and start new ventures is to “go to the Gemba”…the “real place”.  Get out of your office or classroom, and go view how real individuals remedy real problems, where they remedy them.

Learn from the do-ers, not just the talkers.

The greatest entrepreneurs in the globe do precisely this: find out by performing, and from those who are carrying out.

In the previous 6 months our team has witnessed very first hand nearly each form of human waste.   This can be daunting to a society that distributes hand sanitizer like candy, but following the first couple of days it is not so poor.  And when you pay attention to even some of the many million Americans employed in our waste stream, you start to see the incredible engineering innovation opportunities in waste.

Our team is now functioning to operationalize some of these technologies – our lessons learned from pooh.

But we learned some thing more.  We learned that waste innovation is now a international sector and America is probably to miss much of it.

Unintended Lessons: the Global Energy of Pooh

Going to the Gemba usually teaches 1 “unintended lessons” that can be far more critical than the ones we intended to discover.  What else did we discover?

• Americans are scared of waste, whilst three billion folks in “emerging” nations are immersed in it, and are establishing rewarding new industries from it.  This signifies Americans are missing out on our own new technological innovation of waste, and just like we misplaced vehicles, TV’s, consumer electronics, industrial computer software, computing, and other industries to “foreign producers”, we are very likely to drop out on the biological and computational revolution in waste that is staring us in the encounter.

• American scientists and entrepreneurs are creating wonderful new waste technologies proper right here, but America largely ignores them.  Small firms have put in modern sewage “digesters” in rural America for more than thirty many years. These present digesters let genetic mining of sewage with small modification. Just include new “active cultures” like we eat in yogurt to keep our own intestines healthier.  Utilizing normal parts, these digesters can scale swiftly from residential to municipal dimension, faster, at much decrease expense than the huge group-consider sewage plants that are now failing us.  But American law generates a massive, tenured, government-business near monopoly on a hundred-year outdated sewage plant layout.  This signifies “developing countries” are likely to adopt sophisticated distributed waste technologies ahead of we will.

• America has a gold mine in 50 many years of geographic sewage information that would let us mathematically “Google Google-ize” remedy of entire watersheds.  Very good Information: we could “mine” pollution from 1,000 miles of the Rio Grande at when.  Bad News: these data are buried on paper in a lot more than thirty,000 municipalities.  Good News: progressive “data services” firms in Asia can use high tech scanning to transform tons of paper into searchable electronic information bases.  At such volume, little errors in handwriting can be corrected with 21^st century math.  This kind of a data base would aid engineering innovators break cost-free from overwhelmed city sewage systems to distributed “biological waste mining”.

Huge Unintended Insight

 The planet is generating pools of talented young individuals in the most sudden methods.

America’s health care systems are – inadvertently- making a new pool of extraordinary talent.  In our travels we identified younger doctors looking at human waste programs – attempting to escape what some phone “factory medicine” – to support numerous sufferers at once by means of the expanding disciplines of environmental, preventive, and occupational medicine.

Feel about this.  Doctors are skilled to visualize – and correct – really difficult 3-dimensional biological networks.  They see rivers like arteries.  They see sewage digesters as mitochondria.  They can search at the Rio Grande, the Colorado, the Mississippi and quickly visualize a patient that needs support.   They can see how injecting small innovations can aid cure complex methods.

Younger technological innovation entrepreneurs have grown up with inexpensive, worldwide, picture based mostly programs.  They can compose enterprise programs in 3-D networks utilizing video and game-like environments, which produce the organization models in close to genuine-lifestyle ahead of they begin. The only explanation they use text-primarily based company plans is due to the fact a lot of traders use text.  Why create five pages, when you can zoom video from nearly anywhere on Earth?

This visualization is the crucial to unlocking the potential in large biologically driven methods.

The Energy of Pooh....