Bianca Nogrady is a freelance science journalist and author. With CSIRO’s Dr James Bradfield Moody.

Succeeding in a resource-limited world used to be a way of life but soon new technologies will help us survive and use every resource in a sustainable way.

Can you remember what life was like before the advent of mobile phones, the internet and email? If you’re under 30 then probably not, but those of us in our later years might have a distant memory of writing letters by hand, being tied to landlines, researching in libraries and buying everything in person at a shop. Recalling that bygone era, we get a sense of how completely information technology transformed not only our way of life, but our business, industries, governments and society at large. This era produced countless billionaires and generated multi-national companies – Microsoft, Google, Apple – that have integrated themselves into our everyday lives.

Several decades on, we face another such radical transformation − a new wave of innovation that will again propel humanity into a new world utterly different from today. In 30 years, we might once again struggle to remember what life was like before it all happened. But this time we might ask ourselves, probably in a tone of disbelief, “Do you remember when we used to waste resources?”

For the past two centuries, the developed world has benefitted from a veritable cornucopia of resources; not just food, but fuel, energy, fertile land, fresh water and mineral resources. The honeymoon is over. We now find ourselves staring down the barrel of peak oil, dwindling natural resources and supplies of fresh water and agricultural land that are no longer able to meet the needs of a rapidly growing global population. To top it all, we are facing potentially devastating climate change and the environmental bill for centuries of polluting our own back garden.

All these pressures are creating a kind of ‘perfect storm’ for innovation. They drive us in one, inevitable direction: resource efficiency. The next wave of innovation − the sixth since the Industrial Revolution − will see us finally break free of our dependence on the unsustainable consumption of limited resources. We will evolve to a new way of life in which nothing is wasted, everything has a value and, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the global economy will be decarbonised.

The sixth wave
Waves of innovation – also called Kondratiev waves after the Russian economist who first conceived of them – do not come about simply because of technological change. A defining feature of innovation waves is that they are accompanied by massive changes in technology, markets and the institutions that enable and encourage technology and markets to come together.

We are already seeing the beginnings of those changes. Technologies are emerging that enable us to produce clean energy from renewable resources; to significantly improve the efficiency with which we use not just energy but many other resources; to better measure, map and manage the resources we have; and to operate in new ways that often require the consumption of no resources at all.

Now is the time to jump on board this new wave, but what are the principles that will govern it? Perhaps the most fundamental principle that will drive sixth wave innovation is that waste equals opportunity. Find a major source of waste and develop an innovation that either dramatically reduces that waste, finds a constructive use for it or does away with it altogether.

This could be as simple as extracting methane from landfill to generate electricity, turning organic waste from supermarkets into compost or minimising heat and light waste from houses and office buildings.

Another guideline for the sixth wave is to sell the service, not the product. We don’t buy an aeroplane to take a flight, so why do so many of us buy a car that we often don’t use instead of taking advantage of car sharing services? Why buy carpet when you can rent it, and pay for the look and feel of carpet rather than the product itself? Why pay for software components that you might only use once a year, when you can rent that software service when you need it?

A service-based approach also gives companies a strong incentive to provide that service efficiently, and consuming as few resources as possible because it is they, not the consumer, who must ultimately bear the cost of replacing an item when it wears out.

Finally, when all else fails, look to nature. Our planet and its ecosystems have spent about 3.8 billion years perfecting the art of sustainability, so rather than reinvent the wheel over and over again, we can take inspiration from the myriad of examples around us.

When the sixth wave of innovation reaches its peak, what will our world look like? It will be a world without waste; a world in which we think in terms of services delivered rather than products purchased. It will be a world where information is a global commodity but consumables are local; a world where resources are mapped and measured to a degree never before seen; and a world in which we finally realise a truly sustainable existence.

Bianca Nogrady and Dr James Bradfield Moody are co-authors of a new book, The Sixth Wave (www.sixthwave.org).