Technological ingenuity

It is enough to visit the clean, small production plant of Sol-Gel Technologies in Israel (Figure 8.3) to recognize that most of the value added to benzoyl peroxide entrapped in microcapsules comes from knowledge—and thus from human ingenuity—which originates the production of the microcapsules. The price at which the white water-based capsule formulation is sold to customers exceeds more than 1000 times the price of the raw materials used to prepare it. Put another way ... 

In Nature, every output from one process becomes an input for another. Our ingenuity and technology are helping us mimic nature, and to ask the simple, yet vital question, What would nature do here to address some of our more persistent problems, such as toxic clean up with bioremediation and membrane technology for water filtration. 

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