I am in the Hospitality discipline, restaurants and the food industry in general is the most wasteful industry in the world. I found a video clip by Arthur Potts Dawson “A Vision for Sustainable Restaurants” that explains what he has done to reduce his waste. He has built entire restaurants out of recycled materials designed to work with the environment to heat and cool the infrastructure. Recycling everything possible in a restaurant is not possible and some boxes cannot be avoided. Although we can start with the food waste and put it into composts and then the dirt can grow more produce to be used in the kitchen. Excess water from the restaurant can be run throw rock beds lined with mint to clean it making the water almost good enough to drink but can run the toilets and possibly clean hands. In nature everything is used up in a closed continuous cycle, with waste being the end of the beginning. I believe there is going to be a big change and growth in restaurants with the concept of giving the customers local and sustainable products.
In the video clip 12 Sustainable Design Ideas from Nature by Janine Benyus she explores what life can teach us about technology and science from its design. My favorite line in the clip is that “organisms have figured a way to do things they do while taking care of the place that is going to take care of their offspring.” The human population has a long way to go before everyone starts to think about caring for our planet and understand how it will benefit our future and that of our children. We can observe in nature a brittle star has one of the most distorted free lenses in the world and they are self-assembled. To harness this production and produce lenses for consumers would take away the pollution and toxins needed to make lenses for the industrial world. With millions of different species living on earth in the same scenario we can learn from their evolution how to solve our problems that are similar.
rs450bassett 