Episode Summary: Over billions of years, nature has amassed an extensive amount of knowledge. In this conversation on biomimicry, the hosts share some fascinating findings. They explore tactics developed by other living organisms, including plants, animals, and fungi, which have enabled these organisms to evolve, adapt, and thrive on our planet.

Briam will explain how insights from cows’ digestive systems can be mirrored to design more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly sewage systems, and how camel nostrils might inspire energy-efficient cooling for buildings.

Kristina explores the potential of mimicking the carbon sequestration mechanism used by fungi to address human needs.

Drawing on the self-cleaning properties of lotus leaves, Leekei will trace the journey from understanding this natural wonder to applying it within an industrial ecosystem to scale innovation.

To listen to 30 Animals That Made Us Smarter

To access New Skin open innovation testbed

For more information on the project and to order your copy of the Carbon Almanac (one of Amazon best-selling books of the year!), visit thecarbonalmanac.org

Want to join in the conversation?

Visit thecarbonalmanac.org/podcasts and send us a voice message on this episode or any other climate-related ideas and perspectives.

Don’t Take Our Word For It, Look It Up!

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Featuring Carbon Almanac Contributors Brian Tormey, Kristina Horning and Leekei Tang

Brian is a Real Estate Title Insurance Professional and Goat Farmer in the US. 

Kristina is working on design theory and likes to use the design process in everything. Currently in Prague (where she is originally from) and her base is the US

Leekei is a fashion business founder, a business coach, an international development expert and podcaster from Paris, France. 

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The CarbonSessions Podcast is produced and edited by Leekei Tang, Steve Heatherington and Rob Slater.

Hi, I'm Ima.

I live in Scotland.

Hi, I'm Jen and I'm from Canada.

Hi, I'm Aji and I'm from Nigeria.

Hello, I'm Leaky and I live in Paris.

Hey, I'm Rod.

I'm from Peru.

Welcome to Carbon Sessions.

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Hi, I'm Nikki.

Hi, I'm Brian.

Hi, I'm Christina.

Today we're gonna talk about, uh, biomimicry.

So I brought in, uh, definition from Biomimicry Institute.

Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies

found in nature to solve human design challenges and find hope.

Sounds good.

That sounds good.

Yeah.

I like hope.

I like hope.

And I would like to add a comment because I, I was not familiar with

biomimicry before we saw this film on, what is the name of the company?

Interface?

The co company.

I wasn't aware that your biomimicry was something that existed.

And then I looked up, and actually it's a technology that has existed

for probably a full billion cares because, um, nature has been fighting

against an environment for so long.

So imagine all the knowledge has been acquired by nature as a

living body over all these years.

So it's really powerful.

Yeah.

I agree.

You know, it's, I'm gonna go off on a little tangent.

Uh, that's sort of, you know, if we think about evolutionary pressures, right?

It's about different things in nature.

Uh, trying different things, right?

Like, so, uh, mutations lead to different, uh, styles, uh, and

phenotypes and how things are expressed.

How, how a plant works for an animal.

And then the environment creates pressure.

Some of those succeed and some of those don't.

And we have change in adaptation to the environment and circumstances and, and

the solution that ends up being the most efficient, you know, ends up passing

on into the future generations more.

Right.

And here we are on the eve of some of these interesting, uh, things

happening in the, in the world due to ai, where all of a sudden in this

virtual space we can go through.

A lot of tests of something to see what works and doesn't work, and it's sort

of creating this ability to see how things evolve in this AI computer virtual

space faster than we can in nature by modeling it out to see what succeeds.

But here we are.

We've got, even with the most powerful computers, they still can only

look at so many things over time.

We've got around us in nature.

Millions and actually billions of years of samples and testing and which thing

works and which thing doesn't work.

And we've got the, the solution sitting around us and, and we can, it's so

interesting to see examples of this in us learning how to use something that's

been adapted to solve problem A and learn to adapt to it to solve problem B.

So I'm excited to talk about my first one, Ry is really exciting to me,

so thanks for picking this topic.

Yeah.

The first one I wanna go to, first I have to also on the topic of Biomed Creek,

give a huge shout out to Patrick Ari, um, who does a podcast for the P B C

called 30 Animals That made us smarter.

And I remember when this podcast first started, I listened to the first

episode and this sort of lead up to it.

I was like so excited about it and I think I've listened to every

single episode along the way.

I really encourage our listeners to go listen to it.

It's, it's a lot of fun.

He, he does a, a wonderful job with that podcast and I'm gonna borrow from two

of the things I learned from his podcast over time in what we talk about today.

So the first one I wanted to chat about was, It's an episode called Could Cows

Help solve the world's sewage Problem?

Hmm.

And growing up raising cattle myself, uh, this was one that like

I found particularly interesting.

Cattle are a type of, uh, mammal called a ruminant.

They have multiple stomachs that sort of go through this very interesting

process of how they digest their food.

And in the interest of time, even though I'm excited about all four stomachs

that cows have, I won't take us through the entire journey of the four stomach

process, but I will summarize it to say this wonderful, uh, resident of

the city of Bangalore, Thrun Kumar learned about how cow's stomachs

works, and then was living with a, a very big problem there in Bangalore,

which is untreated human sewage, human waste, poop, pee, all, all that kind

of good stuff or not good stuff, maybe.

And the impact it was having in an untreated raw fashion flowing into their

waterways, lakes and, and things there around where he lived in Bangalore and,

and where he was raising his family.

And he ended up leveraging this knowledge of how cows stomachs were and working

with, uh, the biome, the Cree Institute.

To help put together this idea of how to have a different kind of wastewater

treatment, but essentially a sewage plant.

And it uses this idea of in most sewage plants and WA and human waste processing,

we've got an aerobic, meaning there's air involved in oxygen consumption involves.

Kind of bacteria, like certain kinds of bacteria that are, they're consuming

both oxygen and sort of chewing up all the waste product, right?

And helping process it.

And so that waste has to be aerated and stirred and moved.

And there's all this, which takes a lot of energy, right?

And physical facilities to create that process.

To do it.

And, you know, in highly populated locations, uh, without all the economic

resources at plate, be focused on this.

Sometimes that's not happening and you have untreated human waste and which can

create a whole bunch of health problems.

However, the way cow's stomachs work, and this is where the bio comes in, is they

have four different stomachs and it's sort of process where the grass they chew

is first, goes into the first stomach.

And that stomach process it, it, and softens it up with some

acids and some, uh, liquid.

And then it comes back into the cattle, the cow's mouth

steer or Ken and is chewed up.

That's the cut we sometimes refer to as like, you know, they're chewing

the cut again and then it goes back down into the second stomach.

Now in the second and third and fourth stomach process.

It's in a sealed area where it's, it's not aerobic, there's not fresh

air in these stomach cavities.

And so the kind of bacteria that, uh, have evolved to be part of that ecosystem

for breaking down this cellulose and, uh, and all the food that the, the cow

is eaten is a type of anaerobic bacteria.

So they're operating without additional oxygen.

Right.

And so now you think through this, so the, the food comes in and is processed

in this first chamber and there, or the second stomach, and then moves to

the third stomach and then the fourth stomach, and then through large colons,

small colon or va, whichever order the colons are in, and then out the

back and in DeKalb patties, right?

So now this, you know, very interesting individual through Kumar.

Uh, worked and created the system.

They experimented and created the system where they're now processing human waste

and they've built over 50 of these very sustainable sewage plants that don't

require aeration and don't require a lot of that mechanical movement.

They're not consuming oxygen, and they're moving the human ways

through a process that goes through several chambers, four chambers,

just like the cow stomach process.

Where there's different settling ponds, and then there's these anaerobic chambers.

They're sealed off, they're not being aerated, and the ana, and they're, they're

essentially seeding these with cow poop to, which has these anaerobic bacteria

already in them to get the process going.

And out the end of this sewage process comes clean water, clean

drinkable water comes out the other end of the sewage process, right.

And yet there there's almost no, there's no mechanical parts.

There's very little power needed.

There's, there's not chemicals being used.

So the process is a wildly more sustainable process than the a typical,

uh, modern mechanical and chemically driven sewage processing plant.

It does take some more physical space.

It sort of like stretches over more time, but now they're working

to actually design and build these larger footprint processes.

Because their sealed, uh, spaces as opposed to most sewage

plants are open air, right?

Cause they've got all this air that's getting cycled into the fluid.

Now these are actually sealed.

So they're actually building them under housing developments where they can be

buried under the ground and sort of take up space that you're not using for that.

It, it's okay to use that ground for the space.

So anyway, so this is like, to me a really exciting one because it's both.

A cool example of biomimicry and like learning from how we pro a

steer processes their food and leveraging this anaerobic bacteria.

And it's also so much more sustainable and it's making the

place, at least where these plants are being built, a healthier place.

So it's like biomimicry that's like just really checking all the

boxes as far as I'm concerned.

So really, really excited to share that one.

I believe this has still been researched and not, not applied.

Not in New Zealand.

. No.

They're the, the sewage plants you mean?

Yeah, the sewage flu.

No, they've built, they have working, but people are drinking

water from the sewage plant.

Yeah.

Oh, hmm.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So Christine, I know, I think you, yes.

You're up next.

You're gonna tell us some interesting things about fungi or fungi or fungi.

Oh yes.

I'll go one step up , uh, into fungi.

And when I was learning permaculture, I got really excited about

mushrooms and fugi because they were incredible solutions for toxic spill.

And.

Different, uh, heavy metal, uh, cleanup and all those things.

So, but I, for today, I picked up one fungi, which is connected.

I felt like very closely connected to carbon oli, and this fungi is al

and it sequestrate carbon dioxide.

By forming calcium carbonate through the assimilation of nitrate, which is very

scientific, but basically as a result of this process, the carbon dioxide is

exhaled from their respiration, gets converted to solid calcium carbonate in

the soil before it has a chance to escape into the air as carbon dioxide gas.

I love this solution instead of mechanical and all these, uh, future big

factories sequestered a carbon dioxide.

I think this, uh, fun guy knows much better what to do.

That's, that was exciting for me.

And one thing, I have a question.

For our listeners about this, uh, development, uh, article I got it

from was updated in August, 2016.

Now the original article was in Bio Resource Technology in 2010.

And so my question is, how come we know all these things and

they're not happening in big scale?

That's a good question.

Leaky, I feel like your story.

Helps us understand that a little bit more.

Mm.

Partly, I guess maybe, but okay.

My story start with something , which I find very beautiful, which is a lot

of flower uh, you know, those beautiful flowers you sometimes see in ponds.

, , but, I'm not going to talk about the flower itself.

I'm going to talk about its leaves.

You know, those, sometimes you see the very, very big leaves and, um,

Actually, those leaves are sometimes used in Asia to cook rice and, um,

they, they use it as clay to have food and, and, um, I suspected there's some

properties, , associated with the list.

And when I was researching for this, Conversation.

I just type biomimicry examples on Google.

And, um, and I found this Lotus leaves properties, which

I find , absolutely amazing.

And basically, uh, lotus leaves have self-cleaning properties.

And the reason why it has self cleaning properties is, you know,

the surfaces, the, the texture, um, outfits, the surveys of the lib is very.

Specific and has some orientation.

It's a mix of, the shape on top of it's real at the nano level.

I'm not going to share that with you because I'm not going to describe

, the shape of live on the podcast.

but I was so, you know, I got really overwhelmed by this discovery of

biomimicry because, um, I've read that, you know, the application this technology.

Will be probably used in, you know, um, in places that requires a lot of cleaning,

like, uh, hospitals, like, you know, factories, food, practicing factories.

, and so this is great because, um, it uses a lot of, , detergent and

a lot of water and also a lot of resources to clean all these places.

But then I was thinking of.

today's podcast episode that was out today, which is about

laundry and therefore Wow.

Yeah.

But you know what, if, we can work clothes that have , this, you know,

this, the same properties, this same pictures, because one of the

things that we, uh, we talk about with Willam Angie is that laundry,

haha uses a lot word and resources.

So what do we do To make laundry, uh, have a, a small impact on the environment.

One other thing that I keep saying is that, oh, don't wash your clubs too often.

But, you know, it's, sometimes it doesn't smell good.

Um, and, and one of the reason why, uh, you know, you need to wear the clubs

is because the library in your clubs ab absorb, you know, the, the dirt

and the, and the odors and everything.

so I thought, wow, wouldn't be great.

That if we can, you know, there's a fiber, there's a textile or you

know, that can use this technology.

And I started researching it because, you know, I work in fashion.

So I was start to research it and see, okay, well it does not exist.

Oh, maybe I can invent it or work on it.

So I started researching , where this innovation, this discovery is at, and I

find something very, very interesting.

And I think it will help us understand, you know, and probably answer to your

question, Christina, you know, we know that, you know about what we're waiting

for to use this technology or this innovation or this, uh, observation.

Actually, it's a long process because, um, this.

Research papers on lotus leaves your habit.

All these properties has been probably written in your 2010,

2015, something like that.

And has been published at that time as well.

And actually I think it was quite quick because, um, in 2016, and I'm talking

about Europe because I'm in Europe and so So in 2016, there was, um, the first step

, of this, I don't know which I should say, rolling out technology or rolling

out upscaling the, um, this observation into industry is to first build the

laser technology to replicate the surface and um, and to build a membrane.

So the first step was to build this technology and build this

machinery to replicate this.

it was really quite successful because after the full years of building

this machine, they have a value.

That is something what we can do.

And, uh, we talked about something that's like at the nano level, so it's,

it requires new machines to be built.

And so in 2016, you know, the building of, of this laser machine project has started.

And then in 2020, so four years for, , for, um, this project to grow

by building a, consortium or innovation center to build the ecosystem.

So you have, um, large companies of course, but you

also have research centers.

You also have universities.

You have, uh, innovation hubs.

You also hand finance, um, you know, the banks and everything because.

Because when you, when you have an innovation, you also need to build the

ecosystem for, to, it's just useful for it to, operate and, and to scale.

And it's very interesting.

And actually if you're in Europe, or actually I think you can't even

try to apply it if you're not in Europe, if you're interested uh,

with this technology, um, they have built something quite interesting,

Which they call, , an innovation.

okay.

The, the name of the, of the new entity, the consortium they have

built is called New Skin, and it's the innovation ecosystem to accelerate

the industrial uptake of advanced surveys, nano technologies, they have

opened an open innovation test bed.

And, um, you can apply, similar to, you know, to the GEMS web, , telescope.

If you have a project you can apply and say, okay, I'd like to use this

test bed because I have a nightmare and I would like to test it.

And then, um, and then at the same time, they are also, , Other

industries involved, trying to understand how this can be up scaled.

So that gets me very excited because, um, it takes time.

First we are, between the time that research has been done or the observation

has been done, , but , there's uh, people working on it and there's money involved.

They are industry involved, so, That makes me very, very hopeful because,

um, you know, , sooner or later we'll see it in real life and we'll see it in

hospitals and, uh, we also see it in, um, in luxury because, um, you know, our,

like in watchmaking, you know, and all the precision, technologies, industries.

This sounds really fantastic.

This does sound really fantastic.

I find it very interesting to see how.

How, you know, from an observation we get something that scales, you know,

build infrastructure, weight to scale.

Yeah.

I mean there is so much effort to sort of go through that.

What leaky, I wanted to like tag in one other piece that you didn't, I don't

think you sort of really touched to, but it's like, in addition to this being

a cool innovation, it's an innovation that's an alternative to something,

which is, it's the, the other thing is problematic, meaning, Coatings that go

into clothing now, like there's a lot of different kind of coatings that go into

clothing to keep them stain resistant in those things, which are, have, many of

them have personal health detriments and environmental detriments, um, because of

the process used to create those codes.

So like, if this technology can can both improve and innovate and make

better, and help replace something that's detrimental, that's a double win.

Definitely.

And those detriments gets released when the CLO gets washed.

Yeah, correct.

Into the water stream.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the water streams.

And that ends up in, you know, in, in waterways.

Yeah.

I love it.

That's a great one.

Wow.

Well, I think I, I've got one more that I, you know, again, as it, any of our

listeners I'm sure can sort of tell, like, this is a, a favorite topic for me.

Andel, um, I don't know, growing up on a farm with all these different animals

and, and like, I think that's just part of where like my love of, of seeing

things and like figuring out how to like reuse the idea in another way comes from.

So, uh, this, uh, while I grew up on a farm and we had a variety of

animals, we never had camels, but I wanna talk about some cool things

coming out of camels or rather in and out of camels and how that happens.

And again, a huge shout out and thanks to the 30 animals that

made a smarter podcast, you all, everyone please go check it out.

The link will be in the show notes.

Um, it's a phenomenal podcast.

I'm sure you'll enjoy it, uh, as much as I do.

So camels, they also happen to be remnants.

Um, so, uh, they also go through an interesting digestion process.

But instead of talking about that today, I wanna talk about actually

how they breathe through their nose.

And the way they breathe through their nose.

You know, while we humans as mammals have sort of, you know, principally

two main breathing, uh, passageways, the camels have these sort of very

bif, not a bifurcated means too, like, like these mini different pathways that

move through their, their nostrils.

So that, um, in summary, and I'm not doing this perfect, uh, justice, but in

summary, as air moves in, Hot desert air.

The air moves across, um, uh, wet mucus membrane, a whole series of

different pathways, mini sort of little mini nostril branches that move up

through, um, the, the camel's snout.

And it moves across this wet mucus membrane section that has little,

uh, hairs and things that sort of create a ton of surface area

that the air is moving across.

And because it's moist, A few things happen.

One, the moisture, uh, in the nostril is converted into, uh,

moisture in the air, the hot dryer that's coming in from the desert.

That creates a cooling effect, right?

Just like when we sweat and our sweat is evaporated into the air,

that evaporative effect creates a cooling effect that helps cool down.

The, uh, the air and helps cool down that they're breathing in.

So it's coming in hot.

The air is getting cool as it goes through.

It's actually also cooling down the flesh nearby, which is where the blood

is flowing, past that, up to the brain.

So it helps keep their brain extra cool.

So to keep it an optimal operating temperature, which for brains

is even more important than most of the rest of your organs.

And so that one thing that's awesome happens.

So the air is cooled down as it goes down into the.

Camel's lungs and chest cavity.

And then as they exhale, so that air is now both humidified, so it's

not drying out the lungs and it's cooled down, so it's not heating up

their inner chest cavity as much.

And then as the exhale goes through different pathway where there's a whole

process in this part, without getting into the science, I won't explain as well,

but it's essentially doing the reverse.

And it passes it through again, a high surface area process where they've got a,

a sort of series of, um, things happening in the nostril that is absorbing that

water back out of the exhale breast.

So if we all think about for a minute, like being in a cold, wintry kind

of location and you breathe out and you see that big sort of what looks

like a steam cloud, it's a water vapor cloud as you breathe out.

Cuz when we exhale it's very humid.

And then that is getting chilled quickly in the air and turns into this like cloudy

thing in front of us in, in cold weather.

So camels as they are exhaling, are recapturing up to 70% of that

moisture that they're, that normally we as a human, that would all be

exhaled as lost moisture, which is a significant amount of where the

water we drink, right Here's my water.

As we drink water and we hydrate our body, we lose a lot of it through.

Respiration through how we breathe out and losing our moisture that way.

And it's not all through perspiration, sweating.

So there are some people in, in leaky, this is like a, an interesting

sort of compliment to this.

There can be for some kinds of biomimicry and technology,

lots of, um, tech, different technologies needed to come together.

As you were describing to help execute on that biomimicry, right?

Like nanoscale, construction, printing, cutting, like that.

There's a whole level of many other technologies that have to be

developed and perfected to achieve that biomimicry in this case.

Part of what I love about this, uh, example is there are, um, some architects

who were experimenting with this concept.

And they were doing it with very simple little boxes where they

essentially created airflow book two directions, like inhaling and exhaling.

Then again, in the interest of time, go check out the pod, the

other podcast for the full context.

But here what they did is they basically proved using just uh, uh, you know,

physical construction materials and.

Things like water dripping on burlap, you know, to recreate this process flow.

And they were able to demonstrate very quickly that, oh, we can recreate

this, uh, uh, example of how physics is working to both as air comes in.

Cool it, and then as it goes back out, take back out that moisture as it as it

leaves the, you know, in this case a box.

And so they played around with it.

It worked.

They used, they put some things up on the south side of buildings there

in, um, somewhere in the Middle East.

I don't remember the country it was in at the time.

And so they went through this process very interesting.

And now they're starting to deploy this already in like full scale buildings that

are being built where they're creating.

An exhale part of the building up high in the roof where the air is

moving naturally through convection, up and out of the building, but

they're recapturing moisture, but then down in a different area.

They're breathing in outside external hot dry air, but going

through this cooling process.

Right, which.

For me growing up, like these were sometimes sort of called swamp coolers.

That was like a, a phrase for sort of using water to, uh, the evaporation of

water, to cool air, but it's this specific methodology of how they're doing it that's

creating cool air, coming into a building with no, without pumps, air conditioning,

condensation, electricity, like all these things, you know, are, it's not consuming

nearly as much energy to cool a building.

And so places in location, hot locations like Las Vegas, Abu Dhabi, or all

throughout, you know, this sort of very hot and dried parts of the world, can

look to this new technology in their architecture inspired by the inhalation

and exhalation of the camel nostril.

Um, so coming to a building near you, camel nostril cooled

air, this is fascinating.

I, uh, Yeah, I, I was familiar with the swamp coolers, but for me, what's

really interesting is the retaining moisture in, uh, from the air because I

was escaping and that reminded me there was, uh, exhibition while ago by Bruce

Mao and called Massive Change and one of the pieces in that exhibition, It

was very large, almost like a beehive that you can put in the desert and

it will create about half a gallon or a gallon of water in Sahara Desert.

And so I was thinking, oh, that's, that's where the capture

of the, that's interesting.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that nature is really cool.

There's so much we can learn from Mother Nature, and I really think that

we can make so many more interesting conversations on the topic of biomimicry.

Yeah, we should do that again.

Really?

I think so.

I think, yeah, I think you're right.

Lakey.

We've got, we've gotta revisit this one.

There's so many more things out there.

Yeah.

Well, and maybe we list, we ask our listeners, you know, what

are their examples of Biore that they've seen in their lives?

Or that they're dabbling with in their professional or

experimental side of their life.

Um, yeah, maybe, maybe we'll learn about some new things from our

listeners and if they want to talk about this on the show, they'll welcome.

Yeah.

Welcome to the conversation.

Well, this has been a lot of fun.

Thank you for suggesting this topic, leaky.

Was it you that suggested this one, Christina?

Where's Christina?

Oh, Christina, thank you.

What a great one.

That's my, one of my favorite design pieces in all different design theories,

so we should definitely do a sequel.

Great.

Well, thanks everybody.

Thank you.

Bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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