Rethinking industrial production in the age of biology

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This three-part series explores how human production evolved from industrial extraction to emerging biological solutions — and what this shift could mean for the future of materials, industry, and the planet.

The condition of the planet today invites for reflection. Materials that define modern life, such as plastics, industrial chemicals, fertilizers, and fossil fuels, have made our lives easier, more productive, and more globally connected than ever before. They have helped increase food production, enabled new industries, and supported rising living standards across much of the world. Yet these same innovations and the way we produce them are also closely tied to many of the environmental challenges we face today.

What is striking is how recently all these materials were innovated. Most of them only became widely used within the past century, which is barely the blink of an eye in historical terms. Some emerged within the lifetime of our great-grandparents, some of whom are still alive and remember a world that functioned without many of the products we now consider indispensable.

The environmental consequences of these materials and the industrial systems that produce them were noticed early on as well. Earlier generations had already begun to see the warning signs. Today, those signals have grown difficult to ignore.

^{Modern materials have made our life easier, but their production is also problematic. The question now is whether we pass these methods on to the next generation or begin reshaping how we produce and consume.} 

As humanity continues to depend on these materials at enormous scale, an important question comes into view: do we simply pass this industrial legacy on to the next generation, or begin searching for new ways to produce what we need while allowing the planet to recover and regenerate?

To explore that question, it helps to step back. To look not just at the materials themselves, but at how this entire system of production came into existence.
 

Extracting and reshaping nature

For most of human history, our ancestors lived in a world where survival depended almost entirely on what nature provided. Stones could be shaped into tools. Wood could be burned for heat. Plants and animals offered food, clothing, and shelter. The natural world was not something humans controlled; it was something they carefully navigated.

Then, at some point in the distant past, a small but remarkable insight changed everything. People discovered that clay, when shaped and exposed to fire, would harden into something entirely new. What began as a soft, fragile material became durable and useful.

This discovery — fired clay — may seem humble today. But it marked a profound shift in human thinking. For the first time, people realized that materials found in nature could be transformed into entirely new forms using heat and human skill. It was one of the earliest instances of humans creating a material that did not exist in nature.

Some of the earliest known examples of fired clay date back over 28,000 years¹, discovered near the village of Dolní Věstonice in present-day Czech Republic.

^{One day our ancestors discovered that clay, when shaped and exposed to fire, would harden into something entirely new. Nothing ever stayed the same after that.}  

Once this idea took hold, that new materials could be produced by transforming natural resources, it did not remain confined to clay. Over time, people began to notice that certain stones behaved differently in fire. When heated intensely, they revealed something unexpected — metal. Copper appeared first, soft but workable. Later, by combining copper with tin, people produced bronze, a material stronger and more durable than either metal alone.

For the first time, humans were not just shaping what they found. They were combining elements to produce something entirely new. The Bronze Age had begun.

Centuries later came another breakthrough. Humans learned how to extract iron from ore. Iron tools were stronger, sharper, and more abundant than bronze ones. Farming became more productive. Construction advanced. Entire civilizations were reshaped.

Across these early transformations, a pattern began to emerge. Humans had discovered two powerful capabilities: the ability to extract materials from the Earth, and the ability to transform them using heat, pressure, and skill. As time went on, these capabilities were refined, expanded, and eventually scaled.

By the eighteenth century, humanity had entered the industrial age. Production moved from small, manual processes to large-scale manufacturing powered by machines. Over time, these systems were optimized for speed, efficiency, and output.

But beneath all this progress, one principle remained unchanged. Natural resources were extracted from the Earth and transformed using energy, often in the form of high heat, pressure, and chemical reactions.

As scientific understanding deepened, new resources entered this system. Coal fueled early industrial growth. Steel enabled the construction of railways, bridges, and cities. Then, in the nineteenth century, another resource emerged from deep beneath the Earth, which would reshape the trajectory of human civilization — oil.

When people learned how to extract and refine it, oil became the foundation of modern industry. It powered transportation. It enabled the production of fuels, chemicals, and entirely new materials, like plastics, synthetic fibers, and a vast range of industrial chemicals.

From early clay kilns to modern oil refineries, the underlying pattern remained remarkably consistent:

Dig into the Earth → Extract what lies beneath → Apply energy and ingenuity → Transform it into new products

Over time, this approach became the foundation of human industry, and, in many ways, the foundation of the modern world. At first, it appeared remarkably effective. Resources were transformed into products that improved lives in countless ways. The more we produced, the more progress seemed to follow.

But slowly, a different pattern began to emerge. Many of the materials we produced were not designed to return to the Earth. Once their purpose was fulfilled, they did not disappear. They accumulated in landfills, rivers, oceans.

Extraction continued. Production expanded. But regeneration struggled to keep pace. The system that had powered human progress for centuries followed a simple path:

^{Extract -> Product -> Discard}

For a long time, that path seemed sufficient. But as the scale of human activity grew, a new question began to take shape.

What happens when a system built on continuous extraction meets a planet with limits?

And perhaps more importantly — is this the only way to produce?

To answer that, we do not necessarily have to begin with a new invention. We can begin by looking at a system that has been sustaining production and recycling for billions of years: nature.

Long before humans learned to manufacture materials at industrial scale, nature had already been running its own production and recycling system for billions of years.

Unlike many human production systems, nature does not simply extract, produce, and discard. Materials continuously cycle through living systems, where they are broken down and reused again and again.
 

Nature: the master of production and recycling

Life on Earth appeared at least 3.7 billion years² ago, a span of time so vast that it is difficult to fully grasp. One way to understand it is this: if the entire history of our planet were compressed into a single year, life would emerge around late February, dinosaurs would arrive in mid-December, and humans would enter the scene just before midnight on December 31³.

Over these billions of years, Earth has been anything but stable. Continents have drifted, climates have shifted dramatically, and entire groups of species have risen, flourished, and disappeared. Scientists estimate that our planet has experienced at least five major mass extinction events⁴, each one wiping out vast numbers of living organisms⁵.

Yet something remarkable followed each of these events: life returned.

What happened to all those living organisms that died? How did the planet recover from such catastrophic losses? The answer lies, in part, in a powerful process that operates continuously across the natural world: nutrient cycling⁶ — what we might think of as nature’s way of recycling.

When living organisms die, their remains do not simply accumulate indefinitely. Instead, a vast cleanup system gets to work⁷. Bacteria, fungi, insects, and other decomposers break down complex biological matter into simpler compounds, such as carbon- and nitrogen-based nutrients. These are returned to the soil, water, and atmosphere, becoming the raw materials that support new life.

In nature, every ending quietly becomes the beginning of something new.

You can see a small glimpse of this process even in a backyard garden. Dig a small hole in the soil and bury a banana peel. Return a few months later and dig again. The peel will be gone. The microbes and tiny organisms in the soil will have broken it down completely, turning it into nutrients and energy. Behind this seemingly simple transformation lies one of biology’s most remarkable tools: enzymes.

Enzymes are tiny proteins produced by living organisms that act as catalysts, enabling chemical reactions to occur rapidly under conditions where they would otherwise take years, or even, not occur at all. With the help of enzymes, microbes can break down complex materials such as plant fibers, proteins, and other biological compounds that might otherwise persist in the environment for years.

Now imagine this process not in a small patch of soil, but across forests, oceans, and ecosystems all over the planet, unfolding continuously over millions of years.

Leaves fall and decompose into the soil. Marine organisms live and die in the oceans. Nutrients circulate through ecosystems in vast, interconnected cycles. Through these processes, nature continually breaks down old materials and uses their building blocks to produce new life. Production and recycling keep happening in nature.

Humans, despite all our technological advances, have struggled to replicate this kind of circular efficiency in production.

The idea of recycling in modern society only gained widespread attention a few decades ago. In 1970, a young graphic design student, Gary Dean Anderson, created the now-famous recycling symbol of three green twisting arrows. That same year also marked the first Earth Day, a sign that people were beginning to recognize the environmental consequences of industrial production.

^{Only a few decades ago, recycling began to be seriously organized. In 1970, Gary Dean Anderson designed the three-arrow symbol still used internationally today.} 

Since then, recycling systems have been developed across the world. Regulations have been introduced. Waste management practices have improved.

Yet truly circular systems remain difficult to achieve.

Globally, only a small fraction of plastic waste — less than ten percent⁸ — is recycled, and most of it ends up disposed of in nature. Many materials that we recycle lose quality each time they are reused. Plastics and textiles often need to be mixed with newly produced resources to maintain their properties.

In other words, while nature has spent billions of years perfecting a system in which materials are continuously reused, human industry is still struggling to close the loop.

And this contrast leads to an important realization: the challenge is not simply improving our recycling systems, but to rethink how we produce things in the first place.