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By Root 232 0

it away cannot be sustained. In response to this concern, consumer-facing companies have invented clever ways to reduce and reuse waste. One I like is Rickshaw Bags, which has made packs and purses using recycled plastic soda bottles, most notably from Coca-Cola. They’ve also designed a clever and colorful pouch called the Round Trip Shipper. After one of their products arrives in the mail in round-trip shipper packaging, you apply the enclosed prepaid postage label and drop the pouch back in the mailbox. LooptWorks is a retailer that converts waste into material that is usable in clothing and other gear. JGoods offers customers a “sneaker restoration kit” to get more life from their sneakers, which I count as a kind of personal upcycling. There are also apps, including Freecycle, ecofindeRRR, Earth911, and, in the U.K., reuze and Recycle Now, that help you find where to recycle almost anything. Some retailers offer consumers a small amount of money or credit for recycling older models. The offer is: Bring in your old device. We will recycle it and give you 20 percent off your next purchase. The retailer builds loyalty and takes a baby step toward repositioning itself as a service-oriented business.

Like businesses, individuals can also achieve better personal yield management through the Mesh. WhipCar and CouchSurfing allow an individual to get more use for only marginally greater cost from his car and, well, couch. This personal yield management relies on information and information tools available to the individual through association with a Mesh business—yet another advantage of access over ownership.

custom design for all.

Further, in the future, customers can help determine how their Mesh ecosystem is put together. When I’ve talked to people who are involved in food co-ops, one of the things that people love is the ability to heavily influence the selection of products and vendors. The phone services company Credo asks its customers to choose to which worthy causes it will donate a percentage of its profits. Even as Mesh businesses form partnerships in a local area or among similar customers, your ecosystem will likely come together in a very different way than mine. The way the businesses talk to you will be based specifically on what you need and what you’ve asked for.

Best of all, as Mesh ecosystems improve and mature, they will not only mimic nature’s use of waste as food. They will literally help preserve and restore nature’s ecosystems, making all of us a little richer.

7

Open to the Mesh

WHAT’S HERE: and then there was a network, and it was open; what’s that you’re hiding?; open up and make good things happen faster; expecting transparency; early in, we all benefit—later on, I may want my toys back.

In the late 1990s, two young architects, horrified by the plight of war refugees in Kosovo, reacted in a conventionally humanitarian way. They wanted to help. But the way the young couple chose to respond was far from conventional. They created a network, and an innovative way to share ideas, that engaged their fellow professionals. That network, Architecture for Humanity, has unleashed the inventiveness of thousands since its founding in 1999. Similar types of networks, where information and resources are more freely shared, can take Mesh businesses to warp speed.

The couple, Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr, began simply. They created an open design competition to build homes for the refugees. To their surprise, hundreds of ideas poured in, including one for building new structures from rubble, and another for low-cost, inflatable hemp huts. Next up was an initiative to build mobile health clinics in Africa to combat HIV/AIDS. Again, architects all over the world responded. One designed a rotating clinic that begins with planting kenaf seed. The edible plant grows fourteen feet in a month. In the fourth week, the doctors arrive. With the villagers, volunteers mow out the clinic space, a sort of crop-circle office, and add a lightweight roof. When the docs have done their work, the village