In 1970, NASA’s Saturn V rocket launched the Apollo 13 mission into space on what was intended to be humanity’s third landing on the moon. Having settled in to what appeared to be a fairly routine mission, an oxygen tank on the spacecraft exploded and warning lights indicated that two of three fuel cells had shut down. Astronaut Jim Lovell looked out of the craft’s window and reported that they appeared to be venting something into space... oxygen.
Further investigation revealed that the explosion had also damaged the other oxygen tank, putting the spacecrafts supply of electrical power, water and life giving oxygen in jeopardy. The moon mission was aborted and a plan was hatched to use the moon landing craft, Aquarius, to supply power and oxygen to the main spacecraft. There was just one problem. Even with the supply of oxygen, they needed a way to prevent carbon dioxide levels inside the craft reaching dangerous levels. The command module had a supply of lithium hydroxide canisters designed for that purpose, but the square canisters were not compatible with the round openings on the Aquarius. To survive and return home, the astronauts and engineers back on Earth had to devise a way of fitting a square peg into a round hole, using only the items available on the spacecraft.
Faced with a seemingly impossible life and death problem, the NASA teams were forced to dig deeper, open their minds and explore new possibilities. Without access to the state of the art facilities and time it would normally take to develop a component for a spacecraft, the NASA team showed true engineering genius and succeeded.
Down to Earth
Back down here on spaceship Earth, I've always believed that the best designs result from the most challenging briefs. While many of us designers dream of having total freedom to design whatever we like, the truth is that that’s not how we do our best work. Briefs with tight and unusual constraints force us to be more creative and imagine new possibilities.
It’s this type of thinking that we need if we are going to create more sustainable businesses within the existing political, economic and cultural system using tools and technologies that we have available to us today. While there is constant media hype about high-tech panaceas on the horizon like nuclear fusion, carbon capture or lab grown meat, we don’t have time to wait. We need to find solutions that we can implement now, and that means we need to adopt the creative and determined spirit of the Apollo 13 team and find new solutions using the things we already have.
Zero waste thinking
This week, I want to take an opportunity to celebrate some companies that have embraced this mindset beautifully and delivered truly groundbreaking solutions with existing technologies and systems. Interestingly, they are all companies tackling the issue of waste in the food industry and they have all developed very different solutions.
First up is Dizzie, an online Zero Waste retailer that took on the challenge of offering the environmental benefits of zero waste stores with the convenience of mainstream retailers. I’m a big fan of zero waste stores but am always frustrated by the fact the absence of packaging can be a genuine barrier to actually buying food and transporting it home. Dizzie solved this by creating an online zero waste store that ships your dry goods to you in reusable containers, inside a reusable shipping case. The case is even locked using reusable zip ties. The result is a system that conveniently delivers groceries to your front door with zero plastic packaging waste, and takes it away again for reuse.
Next up is Oddbox, who have taken on the food waste challenge by developing a market for vegetables that would normally not be sold, due to them being the wrong size or wrong shape. Having seen that there is perfectly good food being thrown away every week, they developed a veg box delivery service that raises awareness of the problem and creates a market for these otherwise unwanted vegetables.
In a similar spirit but with a very different approach, Toast Ale identified that huge amounts of perfectly good bread are thrown away every day, for example in sandwich factories where they don’t use the end slices of each loaf. They created a beer that apparently has more taste while reducing waste, as they replace the traditional hops in the beer with fresh bread that was going to be thrown away.
And then we have Olio, who have taken another fascinating approach to the food waste problem. Olio saw that often the cause of food waste is that the people who have things to spare are not connected with the people who need it. They created an app and a community that connect people and businesses that have spare food with people and organisations that can benefit from it. It works for individuals to share things with people in their neighbourhood, as well as operating at scale with large retailers to help redistribute food that can’t be sold.
Imagine the possibilities
All of these businesses are very different from each other. Yet they all have found creative ways to build a business model that helps to solve real environmental problems, right now. Theoretically, anyone could have thought of any of these solutions, as they solve problems with things that we already have available today. What makes them stand out is that other people didn’t develop these solutions. This type of truly creative problem solving combined with the determination to turn an idea into reality is very rare.
While new technologies will hopefully provide some solutions in the future, in many ways they’re a distraction from taking action now. I find businesses like Dizzie, Oddbox, Toast Ale and Olio truly inspiring. If this mindset of creative problem solving was widespread, just imagine what we could achieve.
Love these little ingeniouses. Thanks for sharing.