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Water is not abundant in Namibia, so, normally, there would be little to spare for fish farming. However, breweries discharge large quantities of waste water (typically seven quarts are used to produce one quart of beer), providing ample supply for the ponds.

The methane from the company biodigester provides fuel for cooking and heating for 80% of the town population, which would otherwise come from wood. And the brewery no longer has to pay for the disposal of its spent grain, which is formed into blocks called “beer cakes.” Each 1.8 ton of beer cake now produces one ton of fish. In contrast, when beer cake is used as cattle feed it takes seven tons to produce a ton of beef—due to its poor digestibility for that species. As in Fiji, the fish waste, after it is steam heated using more of the waste methane gas, becomes substrate for mushrooms.

ZERI’s Work in Gaviotas, Colombia

In 1970 the dream of Gaviotas founder, Paolo Lugari, was to build a sustainable community that would provide jobs for the impoverished in the inhospitable, acidic soil of Colombia’s llanos. He knew that if he could do it there—on wide expanses of savannah-like country where virtually nothing grew except along the rivers—it could be done anywhere.

By the time Gunter Pauli first visited Gaviotas 1982, the community had developed wind and solar power and had designed a manual pump that enabled them to bring clean drinking water from hundreds of meters below the surface. Paolo had shared the pump technology with indigenous peoples, bringing them a reliable supply of potable water for the first time.

But the dream of a forest had eluded them until Gunter introduced the idea of adding a fungus when planting the Caribbean pine seedlings to form a mycorrhiza, a nitrogen-fixing mat among the roots of the trees, essentially a self-fertilizing system. The trees flourished and reached maturity in 10 years. Now, the distilled resin from the trees provides Gaviotans with two products—turpentine and colofonia, which is used to make glossy paper coatings and paint pigments. Continual planting increased the forest, which has provided more than the resin. In the shade of the pines more than 250 species of Amazonian rainforest plants have sprouted including fruit trees whose juice is now bottled, and the decomposition of tree and shrub debris has created more than half a foot of top soil and raised the pH from 4.0 to 6.0. By the time I traveled to Gaviotas in June of 2005, a 20,000-acre rainforest surrounded the community.

The Colombian Air Force was so impressed with the jobs created in Gaviotas, that they hired ZERI to assist in creating what Gunter calls “Gaviotas II” and the Air Force calls “The Project for Life.” The Air Force has donated 100,000 acres of military land in the northwest corner of Vichada (close to the Venezuelan border) to be reforested and farmed using Chan’s integrated system to provide home and livelihood for 10,000 people. Their military base at Marandua, will host a Center for Sustainability, where former military personnel and impoverished people from Bogota will be among those to be trained in ZERI’s systems design philosophy.

Upsizing is Pauli’s Answer to Downsizing

In our current economic system, productivity is achieved through downsizing—finding ways to produce more using fewer employees. Raising productivity this way increases wealth for shareholders at the expense of those who lose their jobs.

Further, our utilities and manufacturing processes employ and emit toxic chemicals that are accumulating in our soils, water, and bodies and leading to increases in allergies, cancers, and other illnesses. While businesses in industrialized countries have incrementally improved their environmental performance, their movement is very slow, and even the cleaner production is still very dirty.

“Creating wealth for a few, while perpetuating poverty and misery for many” says Pauli, “is neither ethical nor productive.”2 He advocates a different system that he calls, by contrast, “Upsizing.”

Companies that embrace Upsizing, which employs the Zero Emissions Concept and concentrates on optimizing the productivity of the raw materials, can generate more value, more income, and more jobs. At the same time they can eliminate waste from their processes. Called by some the industrial model of the future, UpSizing examines the potentially harmful effects from emissions, effluents, and other by-products and finds ways to re-use them that eliminate adverse impacts. If industries that can utilize one another’s waste products can be geographically clustered, the cost of transporting waste is eliminated, which reduces demands on fossil fuels. By finding productive uses for formerly discarded wastes, UpSizing creates jobs while increasing productivity, which turns old thinking upside down. Of course, natural processes have been using the Upsizing principle all along. Think of a tree, discarding thousands of leaves and excess seeds each year. That could be a real waste problem, except that around that tree live the squirrels, birds, and millions of insects, bacteria and fungi that transform those “emissions” into jobs and food.

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