Practical Sustainability Strategies, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 9Environmental Innovation Through Biomimicry

In the 1600s, Europe was hit with a crippling shortage. People had to deal with the fact that a valuable commodity was increasingly in short supply. What was it? Rags.

Rags were used to make paper, and paper was in great demand. Publishers of books, newspapers, and political pamphlets all clamored for more paper. But there just weren't enough rags. Advertisements appeared, asking women to “save their rags.” In 1666, England banned the use of cotton and linen for the burial of the dead, decreeing they must be saved for making paper. One entrepreneur even suggested using the cloth from Egyptian mummies. The scarcity of rags led to fearful paper shortages in Europe and America.

Then a French scientist took a walk in the woods. Réne-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur was an accomplished physicist and chemist. He was also a man who loved bugs. Walking in the woods one day, he came upon an abandoned wasp nest. Delighted, he began to examine it in detail, and an astounding fact dawned on him: the nest was made of paper, paper made by wasps, paper made without the use of rags. How? The wasps did it by chewing wood and plant fibers.

What wasps could do, he argued, man could find a way to do also. It took decades, but his discovery was the spark that inspired inventors to develop ways to make paper from wood pulp. Thanks to Réaumur's nature walk, we can now do what once would have been considered almost criminal: crumple up a piece of paper ...