Institute For The Future

Garbage and the Microbial Economy

Biology will drive the next century.  Biological-based methods will not only disrupt how we make things, they’ll also disrupt how we source materials for production and energy. What if our waste streams could provide productive resources and our mundane daily movements could generate the electricity we need? How could major disruptions like these possibly shift our reigning economic model?

Science fiction writer and co-editor of BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, described the “wumpus” in his book, The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011, pp. 10-11). A Wumpus is a reclamation drone of the future. It has numerous long, metallic tentacles that that can break down any human artifact, even as large as a building or vehicle. It throws the chunks of materials into its hopper where smaller tentacles with countless cilia reduce the matter to its constituent atoms.  And it its wake, the wumpus leaves heaps of rich soil.

In our context in which we use too much, waste too much and demand is ever rising, wouldn’t it be convenient to have such an efficient means for repurposing waste?

The closest thing to a wumpus today is offered by Kiverdi, a Berkeley-based startup. They have developed a process using microbes that can turn any form of waste into renewable, high value consumer chemicals and high-grade fuels.  These are the basic inputs for personal care products, soaps and detergents, and plastics.  And the fuels are of a higher grade than ethanol.

These breakthroughs are exciting, but the potential economic implications are too:

• How will this microbial wumpus disrupt industries, global supply chains, and economies dependent on natural resource extraction? 
• Can Kiverdi’s microbes further amplify the distributed manufacturing model (see IFTF report) promised by the advent of 3-D printing (see BBC video) by providing the distributed production of the key inputs as well?

Another example of potential microbe-driven revolution comes from Lawrence Berkeley Lab.  Researchers there have engineered a virus that can generate energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks, such as shutting a door or climbing stairs. The power industry is currently shifting from a centralized to a distributed electricity generation system.  This advance in microbe-based energy generation would take decentralization to a completely new scale.

If new value creation can take place on a micro scale, what does this mean for the distribution of productive gains in the economy?  In the United States, we are witnessing a growing concentration of wealth in our corporations and dramatic new levels of income disparity (see Emanuel Saez). Will these new opportunities provide the cure for the “CEO economy” in which productivity gains are concentrated exclusively in the C-suites of our corporations (see The Atlantic)?  If the means of production are potentially in everyone’s own hands, could we be moving toward a neo-craft economy.  Signals of such a possibility can be observed in the burgeoning maker movement (see Chris Anderson).

We’ve witnessed how social organization mirrors technology and the shift from the centralized model of the old industrial economy to the network economy, of many smaller, highly specialized economic actors.  The signals described above suggest that we may now be embarking upon the “microbial economy”.   If the use of microbes will drive new value creation and allow for doing so on a micro scale, this could create very different frameworks for society. 

Could a biological model explain the economic value of proximity and other drivers of innovation? As micro-scale economic actors proliferate, diversity will expand and the speed of adaptation will increase, therefore, speeding also the innovation process.

IFTF researchers have been studying the microbial self (see IFTF’s Health Horizons and Ten-Year Forecast Programs).  How exactly are we rubbing off on each other?  We’ve certainly witnessed “contagion” of ideas, fear and language.  In a microbial economy, we may find that contagion and other biological metaphors become more than metaphors—they become the literal drivers of the next economy.