To mussels, carbon dioxide is a good thing. They and their fellow mollusks extract it from seawater to use in making their shells. A company called CO2 Solution is now copying that process to remove the greenhouse gas from industrial smokestacks.

This is just one example of how companies are discovering that “biomimicry,” – imitating nature’s brilliance to solve problems – can benefit both the environment and the bottom line.

Now, Biomimicry maven Janine Benyus and eco-entrepreneur Gunter Pauli are teaming up to uncover nature’s best solutions and help businesses around the world emulate these elegant, nontoxic technologies to meet human needs harmlessly. “Other organisms…are geniuses,” Benyus said at the 2007 Bioneers By the Bay Conference. “We’ve thought of them as things we could eat or harvest, and now we’re studying them as mentors.”

These “mentor” organism reveal ways to control bacteria without breeding resistance, harvest metals from polluted water instead of mining them from the Earth, and make flexible, inexpensive solar cells that work on vertical surfaces in low light. Sound too good to be true? Companies are already investigating ways to mimic these processes.

The companies applying biomimicry to design and make new nontoxic materials and products are leading the next green revolution. To make sure they have plenty of inspiration, a team of scientists at the Biomimicry Institute is sifting through stacks of journal articles. They’ve already identified more than 2,000 “biological ideas” worth copying, according to Benyus.

These ideas will be published in a biomimcry portal and will be unpatented and therefore available to everyone. And not only that—the companies that profit from mimicking nature’s brilliance will be urged to donate a percentage of the proceeds to an international conservation organization that will direct the funds to protect the habitat of the organism that inspired the innovation. “It’s a way of finally saying ‘thank you’ as a culture,” Benyus said. “We didn’t get the idea ourselves; the real patent holder is the organism.”

Benyus and Pauli are compiling the first batch of promising ideas into Nature’s 100 Best, a book due out next fall. In the meantime, stay posted by visiting the Biomimicry Institute and Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives. For Janine Benyus's plenary talks at the Bioneers Conference, click here.