[Scpg] water from thin air and fuel from pine trees show business ideas for the future/Report from Bhutan on the World Congress on Zero Initiatives for a Blue Economy

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 http://www.businessbhutan.bt/?p=2756
water from thin air and fuel from pine trees show business ideas for the future
POSTED BY BUSINESS BHUTAN | 18 SEPTEMBER 2010

Lyonpo Thakur Singh Powdyel with Gunter Pauli who suggested that Bhutan can produce engine fuel from pine trees. Both of them were key note speakers at the World Congress on Zero Emmissions Initiatives www.zeroemissionshawaii.org at Honolulu that ended yesterday

Tiny prayer-wheel sized wind mills, thousands of them, along our valleys, all connected to a turbine to produce electricity that can charge batteries used in electric cars. Villages along the Thimphu-Trashigang highway replace the petrol and diesel stations to supply wind-energy-powered-batteries for cars. Like replacing gas cylinders, batteries are replaced after every 100 kilometers. This can be the future village industry, where farmers produce rice, maize and energy.

This is not science fiction. The tiny wind mill idea for Bhutan is the brain child of sustainable management guru and innovator, Gunter Pauli. His ideas formed the backbone of the five-day World Congress for Zero Initiatives that ended at Honolulu, Hawaii, yesterday.

The Congress, which had CT&T, the world’s biggest producer of electric cars as a main sponsor, saw business leaders and policy makers exchanging sustainable business ideas that produce zero carbon.

Education Minister Lyonpo Thakur Singh Powdyel was a key speaker at the conference. Along with Gunter Pauli, other presenters included a Swedish green architect and a voyager who uses 14th century navigation techniques.
While the conference discussed ideas that can be applied in Bhutan and gels with Gross National Happiness, it is up to local business houses to take up projects, remodel in into the local context and make it work.

When Gunter Pauli was in the country earlier this year, he met with local business people. A person who observed the interaction said though many appreciated the environment-friendly ideas, they were worried about the returns from the projects.

Gunter Pauli’s ideas are unconventional, which may not readily ring a bell with the ordinary Bhutanese entrepreneur.  His proposals for Bhutan included Made-in-Bhutan engine oil from pine resin; locally certified and graded mushrooms for export; fog harvesting to fight water shortage; and building materials from waste glass bottles.
But these ideas need entrepreneurs who are daring to go beyond usual business practices and have  a deep ethical concern for the environment. Lyonpo Thakur Singh Powdyel’s address also reflected on the general reluctance to creatively engage with new ideas.

“I am sure, even as you explore the unlimited possibilities of wind energy, for instance, you will create room for will energy. In your search for alternative sources of energy, please allow enough space for moral energy to flow and animate your many innovations. This is the secret to sustainability,” he said yesterday.

Gunter Pauli’s ideas, elaborated in his book, Blue Economy, inspires entrepreneurs to become ‘sustain-o-preneurs’.
Despite having a unique development philosophy in GNH, Bhutan’s economic future plans have been pretty conventional. Strict environmental policies, in its focus of conservation, stifle innovative ideas. Now we pride in our conservation ideals. But prosaic policies can lead us to being branded as eco-fanatics. There is where innovation comes in.

For example, Bhutan has enough pine forests. The resin tapped from the trees without cutting it down produces turpentine, which once purified is an ideal fuel for combustion engines. This has already been experimented in Columbia and New York Times featured the innovation as a cover story last year. Resin is inflammable and makes forest fires more dangerous. So the tapping of it reduces such risks. But such a business can be helped only with policy change.

Another area of concern for Bhutan is the super-sonic speed in which the country is pursuing economic growth, the steel frame of which is standard MBA lessons.

Blinkered by modern management gimmicks, our development policy may gets caught in “inside the box” thinking.
Gunter Pauli, in Blue Economy, suggests an alternative to the conventional MBA method.

He calls it Nature’s MBA: Mastery of Brilliant Adaptations.
What does it mean?

Normally, if a company significantly reduces pollution, it is considered an achievement. But this “doing less bad” model is not sustainable. Blue Economy comes in here. It is about not just going green but using innovative technology to substitute what is bad for the environment.

A much publicized narrative about Bhutan’s conservation policy is the “we are sacrificing for the world”. We are punishing our industries and pushing our farmers into low-income organic methods, another argument goes.
But a Blue Economy approach is different. It finds opportunities everywhere.
When we think of a resort, the image of an expensive, elite structure comes to our mind which is inaccessible to the common man. Interestingly, such high-end resort chains present themselves as the vanguards of live-close-to-nature ideals. With Bhutan pursuing its 100,000 tourists target a lot of entrepreneurs have joined the high-end resort rat race. But Blue Economy suggests an eco-cultural resort that is build in a low cost model, with competitive tariff, and reflecting the local culture of the place it is situated.


Bhutan is the right place to start sustainable innovations. Lyonpo Thakur Singh Powdyel put it in perspective when he described how students here are accepting the ‘Green Schools For Green Bhutan’ idea.
“They are looking at green schools in more than the natural sense of color,” he said.

But when it comes to fresh business practices the lead should be taken by the entrepreneur.  And the biggest hurdle is the herd mentality in Bhutanese business. An idea may have worked elsewhere, but unless someone else has tested in locally, people do not dare to venture into it.

“Change is difficult. But it has to begin with an idea,” said Thinley Choden, the country director of Read Bhutan, which has associated with Gunter Pauli’s Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives.
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