One word: growth. Today productivity means cutting costs and downsizing workers. No wonder business is on the defensive! Who supports higher productivity if it means losing jobs? Our model says you increase productivity by growing faster. Find ways to generate more revenue -- and jobs -- from the same raw materials.
Think about sugar. You can't harvest sugar cane year-round, so lots of expensive equipment sits idle for months. In Okinawa, for example, the sugar industry is the second-leading source of employment. But the mills operate only two months of the year. What if you could use the waste from sugar mills to make other products -- generating new revenue and new jobs in the process?
We're designing a zero-emissions system to do that. The chief byproduct of sugar processing is waste material called bagasse. Most mills just burn it as fuel. But it contains fibers that can be used as substitutes for cellulose -- for example, in paper pulp. Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia produce lots of sugar and incinerate the waste. Then they destroy their rain forests because they need cellulose for paper. It's a huge missed business opportunity.
We are executing. Namibia Brewers Ltd. is the first company to commit to building a commercial plant based on zero-emissions principles. Its flagship beer is Windhoek Lager. It's a premium, high-quality beer, a good seller in Botswana and South Africa.
On June 1 we'll start brewing a new beer, using sorghum, in Tsumeb, in Namibia's northern desert area. Meanwhile, we're building the zero-emissions system around the brewery. The creativity of our researchers is incredible. We've got 40 different biochemical processes to reuse everything: heat, water, solid waste, carbon dioxide. These processes will create 12 different products in addition to the beer.
The first thing we do is treat spent grain as a resource rather than as waste. We've figured out a way to grow mushrooms on it. So in addition to selling beer, this operation will sell mushrooms -- and Namibia has imported all its mushrooms until now. But growing mushrooms is just a start. We've also devised a way to extract protein from the grain. What's the secret? Earthworms. We introduce earthworms into the grain. They eat it, converting vegetable protein into animal protein. Then we use the worms as chicken feed. They make high-quality feed -- the chickens love it -- and you can produce lots of it.
Now we've got mushrooms, chicken feed, and chickens -- which, of course, create their own waste. We collect that waste and put it in a machine we call a digester, which generates methane gas that produces steam for the fermentation process. We use the waste from the digester as feed for fish farming. A brewery pumps out lots of water. That water will flow into ponds, and the ponds will support eight different types of fish that we can sell.
This isn't just a brewery. It's a fully integrated biosystem. We estimate this complex will produce seven times more food, fuel, and fertilizer than a conventional operation, and create four times as many jobs. We need time to generate conclusive results. But I'm convinced our numbers will blow people's minds.
We live in an age of oversupply. Customers have more choices than ever. If you tell people, "We offer high quality, low prices, good features," what you're really saying is, "We're the same as everyone else." You need something bold, new, different. Then you need a simple, clear-cut message that targets what people care about and is easy for them to verify.
Zero emissions is such a message: "We don't pollute. We offer healthier products. We create jobs." I've seen the power of that message. It's what we did when I was CEO at Ecover. We didn't sell, we educated. We didn't compete on price, we competed on emotion. We took products that were utterly devoid of excitement -- who cares about laundry detergent? -- and made them something special.
The heart of our message was our factory. Thousands of people visited us in Belgium. It became a media attraction, a place for political leaders and corporate executives to visit. People walked on the roof, touched the grass, planted flowers. We captured 6% of the Belgian detergent market in 18 months, and we barely spent a dime on advertising.
Our factory didn't just supply cleaning products; it supplied education and entertainment -- edutainment. That's what people are looking for today. They want products that reflect their values, and they want a good story. That's how you create a bond with customers.
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