Emulating Ecosystems: A Story About Beer
Businesses interested in meeting environmental sustainability goals can learn a lot from ecosystems. Functioning ecosystems are closed-loop systems, where one organism’s waste is another organism’s food or building material. An example of such industrial ecology is the ZERI beer brewing system that replaces the “make, take, and waste” linear resource stream with a circular system in which waste is treated as a resource rather than as garbage. This is biomimicry at the system scale.
