Gunter Pauli is widely regarded as one of the leading experts on sustainable economic design. His mission is to challenge orthodoxy. The key to his approach is modelling systems that solve problems by harnessing or imitating nature. These generate no waste or emissions, but do generate jobs and social capital – something of a holy grail for readers of this magazine.

In person, Pauli exudes a huge amount of energy, so it’s no surprise to learn he’s founded, chaired or sat on the board of a multitude of companies. One of these, Ecover, which he’s credited with rescuing in the 1990s, also gave him a key insight that guides his philosophy today. This was witnessing at first hand how Ecover, a brand established to promote sustainability, had inadvertently caused the loss of Indonesian rainforest and habitat for orangutans through its sourcing of palm oil. It was a salutary lesson, teaching him that sustainability must recognise the whole system.

He’s mindful that we appear to have got the wrong end of the stick when it comes to environmentalism: “People speak of a Green Economy, but the Green Economy today is an economy where whatever is good for you and for the environment is expensive. How is that possible?

“How is it possible that food from particular restaurants which is bad for your health, is cheap? That means we goofed up in the whole economic system. If being green means being expensive and subsidising things to make it viable on the market and having to tax people to death, that can’t be the object of sustainability.

“What I’m saying is we need a ‘Blue Economy’, which has to embrace innovations whereby we’re not only looking at the quick fix of an environmental problem, we’re looking at how we can respond to the basic needs of everyone in our society. That includes water, food, housing, health, energy, transport, mobility and ethics.

“It’s the sweeping benefits of the Blue Economy that will make changes not only to our economic situation, but to our environment, and ultimately, our happiness.”

These days, he heads up the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI) Network, an organisation dedicated to developing and applying the systems that Pauli and his colleagues have identified. It contrasts with how we are currently dealing with our natural resources. “Take water. The water we’re supplying today is polluted, it has residues of antibiotics and synthetic hormones in it, which are not being taken out… more than 14 per cent of the European water that is privatised and supplied today does not meet European standards.

“How did this come about? It’s because we made decisions without seeing all the interrelations and the connections. Now, I’m not saying this was bad and here is the good, I’m saying let’s take stock of the reality and ensure that we can supply quality products. That means we have to change the technology, we have to change the delivery process, we have to change the way we do it now – that’s why I always insist on having new rules of the game.

“At the moment when you want clean water you need a filter or you need to add chlorine, but what I’m saying is that I can give you clean water without filters and without chlorine, now, by having a vortex.”

Explained in detail in his book (reviewed in Resource 71), vortex technology is based on the same gravitational forces that allow rivers to cleanse themselves, without the need for external energy supplies or matter.

“That means I can do water cheaper, I can do water faster, I can do it more locally and – coming to the real debate – I can compete with most of you out there on the market”, says Pauli.

For him, the idea of a circular economy – where nothing is wasted or viewed as waste – is best seen in the world around us: “Nature has an extremely efficient system that functions well – it has weathered meteorites, it has weathered climate changes, it has weathered everything. It is a master of brilliant adaptation – the whole system works together and actually interacts with itself so that it is always improving its efficiencies, it always is going from scarcity to abundance.

“We as human beings are changing everything around us, but we don’t change, we just keep on behaving the same way. Our economic system is only looking at scarcity... and when there’s abundance then we’ll have no more need for economists!”

But Pauli argues that the heart of this change to a sustainable economy will not be through national governments. “Firstly, we can’t expect too much from the President of the United States, we can’t expect too much from the Prime Minister of the UK”, he asserts. “I think the real government that we can, and should, engage with is local government. They’re closer to people and closer to the issues that really are critical in that local environment, so they are critical.

“Secondly, we need people who are able and capable to think out of the box – but even that isn’t enough – you’ve got to be able to implement and change the rules of the game. The key is looking at who is going to do that. For example, the Fortune 500 corporations can’t do it, the European Union can’t do it (because it is a very consultative process) – so the only ones that have that high degree of freedom to actually do something very different and play according to new rules, are entrepreneurs and small and medium sized corporations.”

Indeed, the problem with governments and multinational corporations is that they are too often preoccupied with shorter-term goals, says Pauli – whereas someone who is in their early 20s can “easily imagine 20 years down the road”.

“The problem is not just short-termism, the problem is really the preoccupation with core business and cash flow. If you’re only looking at money and making money with money, then one of the results is short-termism. When that is your world… you’re never going to have strategic vision, you’re never going to be able to get beyond even your next day. What we’re in need of is people who say ‘gee whizz, we’re in a crisis’ and can identify where the real low-hanging fruits of opportunities are.”

When I ask Pauli if he thinks that global leaders try and push the sustainability agenda enough – he concedes that though it’s up to local government and entrepreneurs to make the change, little is being done at a national level to help them do it.

“I had more than 100 pictures taken with 100 heads of state, prime ministers and kings… but that’s the only thing I’ve had from them, pictures!” he pauses for dramatic effect. It’s a line I suspect he’s delivered innumerable times at events around the world.

“In 1992, I was at the Rio conference with many heads of states and they were looking for the right thing to say on sustainability – then at Rio+20 last year, they were saying the right things, but they were doing nothing… this wasn’t Rio+20, this was Rio minus 20. They’ve got the appearance right, but the content is not there.”

The crux of our problem at the moment, says Pauli, is that we are attempting to fix systems that are already intrinsically broken.

“Take paper – if we had chosen, for example, bamboo as our base material for paper, we wouldn’t have this problem of seeing recycled paper being more expensive than virgin – as bamboo fibre is longer. It’s because the fluff and the pulp we’ve chosen to use in the first place is the wrong one. It’s a hard job to do something good with something that was wrong to begin with… don’t blame the recycling, blame the material that you’ve chosen in the very beginning.”

What we’re missing, he continues, is some of the fundamental ethics in acting to stop our wasteful and harmful practices. “Even if you’re recycling more and polluting less than before, you’re still polluting. You wouldn’t tell a thief who is stealing less that he is doing a good job – he is still stealing and should go to jail. So for me, one of the greatest demands I have on big business is stop the double morality.”

Looking at what can be done for the waste industry, Pauli tells me about the South Korean city of Ulsan, where the founder of Scandinavian Biogas, Erik Danielsson, adopted technologies from a wastewater treatment plant with those from a landfill, to create an abundance of gas.

“When Ulsan’s wastewater treatment plant was up for renewal along with the landfill, they adopted some innovative technologies that allowed them to blend the sludge from the waste water treatment with the organic components of the landfill and generate four times more biogas than any of the engineers had ever thought possible.

“It was a shock to the city because now they were generating so much biogas they actually were making money.

“Now with scrap and rubbish and waste, you’re not going to ask people to pay you, you pay them to get rid of it because otherwise it would be a health hazard. But now you start realising that with a series of these technologies I describe in my book, you’re able to have multiple revenues with multiple benefits.

“If the rules changed like this, local governments could get paid, which in turn would reduce the tax load on citizens... that is what I’m basically arguing for in The Blue Economy. We have to turn our economy around not only to be more efficient, but to see a catalyst for development so that we can respond to the basic needs of everyone.”