S2D2 is a cutting edge design and execution firm of sustainable and regenerative process systems that re-invent the way we manufacture products, practice agriculture, generate energy, and provide infrastructure

safely. intelligently. regeneratively.

Strategic Innovation

S2D2 integrates select emerging technologies into whole systems designs to regeneratively fulfill a multiplicity of needs beyond typical take-make-waste approaches — a hallmark of production and management processes that have resulted in devastating resource depletion and negative environmental impacts.

Whole Systems Thinking and Integrative Design

-closed loops to achieve maximum efficiency, operational effectiveness and to optimize the use and reclamation of all available resources (including labor)

-operational and community self-sufficiency and resilience – localized procurement/provision

-optimizing materials selection, use, and security

-employing innovative technologies that create “industrial ecologies” whereby the outputs of one process supply the inputs for another (industry, agriculture and municipal services can be readily linked and symbiotic in this design)

-employing total cost accounting to valuate ecosystem services and reflect true prosperity; eliminate cost/impact externalization

-social innovation creating values-led brands; the proverbial “doing well by doing good.”

-appropriately scaled, deployed and distributed systems based upon a sustainable and balanced equation between inputs/outputs

Schematic of an integrative design involving many of the processes, technologies and products S2D2 utilizes

Defining Sustainability Differently

S2D2 ascribes to the same definition so incisively captured by a fellow sustainability professional, Ivan Weber-

Sustainability is design.

It is important for us to note that the term ‘sustainability’ needs to be distilled to its essence, “sustain – ability”: the ability to sustain, exercised as an ongoing, life-long process.

The people who do the sustaining — local communities — must acquire the capacity to do so.  Sustaining is a deliberate act of individuals, communities and societies to create equilibrium between their own needs and the needs of the natural world.

Those who do the sustaining must envision and embrace the nature of their ecological and economic environment.  Given that ‘sustainability’ is a condition that we can only recognize after having reached it, then strategies for approaching that condition are matters of design.

“When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir