Case Study: Merredin Desert Flower

In 2000, a small desert town in Western Australia asked a simple question: what do we do with an old pumping station? The answer turned out to be worth millions of dollars a year. And then the town rejected it.

The city council of Merredin had a problem. The town had received government funds to renovate a historical pumping station on its outskirts, but not enough to do anything useful with it. The town had no funds of its own. So the council posed the question: what to do?

At the time, Tom Bosschaert was studying at the University of Western Australia. He had just started the first outlines of what would become SiD and was eager to try this new integrated approach. He visited the town with a small team of university students and investigated the pump station. But while the town council focused on the historic building itself, the team quickly realized the town had bigger fish to fry.

A System in Decline

Merredin existed as a through-stop on the way to the inland gold mines. It functioned as a truck-stop and supply station, with restaurants and motels. It hosted a small train station and maintained the water pumping station that brought fresh water from the coast further inland. Over time, agriculture developed: wheat and other grains under irrigation. The town branded itself as a source of healthy foods. Its early colonial history gave it unusual cultural heritage, including one of the first theaters in the state.

But trucks got bigger and faster. Fewer stopped. The largest factory closed. Youth left for better prospects elsewhere. The theater shut its doors. Merredin was dying.

And there was another problem, a strange one for a desert town: high groundwater. Merredin sits in an invisible underground valley. The sparse rain that falls for miles around flows underground toward the town, picking up salt from the desert along the way. This saline groundwater seeps into roads and building foundations, gets sucked upward, evaporates in the sun, and leaves its salt behind. The salt cracks foundations and roads, creating a constant maintenance nightmare and heavy costs.

Mapping the Resources

Bosschaert set up a quick-scan investigation to determine the problems and resources. He drew up a matrix using the categories that would later become ELSI: energy, materials, economy, culture, health, happiness. With a few local helpers and over about three days of interviews and observations, he formed a coherent picture.

The asset matrix revealed: plenty of sunlight, an available labor force, a "health" image, access to a strong logistics network of road and rail. Other assets included the saline groundwater itself, plenty of cheap land, and the regeneration capacity of the underground aquifer. Ecologically the town had few resources, but culturally it had interesting historic buildings. There was no shortage of eager, energetic people wanting to start a new enterprise. What was missing was a viable economic model.

A critical insight emerged during the mapping: what appeared as a problem in one light could be seen as a resource in another. The saline groundwater that cracked foundations was also a vast, self-replenishing underground reservoir. The empty land that signaled decline was also available space. The brutal sunlight that baked the desert was also free energy.

The Search for a Solution

The solution process began with "cross-breeding" every asset with every other, testing what combinations might produce. Solar desalination of the groundwater? Too expensive, too slow. A health spa using the salt water? Weak business case. Nothing stuck.

Then Bosschaert changed strategy. The saline groundwater, sunlight, land, and pumping station were clearly assets. The question became: what element could serve as a catalyst between these four resources?

He progressed down the ELSI ladder, considering technological, biological, cultural, and individual options. A biological resource stood out: thriving biological systems generate value without human intervention if the conditions are right. If something could grow using abundant sunlight, semi-arid land, and saline groundwater, it would be self-sustaining.

He looked at fungi, bacteria, algae, and narrowed in on organisms that thrive in saline water. That is where he found the gem: an organism he had never heard of before, which seemed a perfect match.

Spirulina.

The Spirulina algae loves saline water. It loves sunlight. It grows at breakneck speed in open-air shallow basins that require a lot of surface area, and thus, land. It is used as an edible blue coloring agent in cosmetics and as a source of vitamin B12, making it a health-food product. Its various uses establish solid market value, and the algae are sold in a freeze-dried state that keeps well.

The old pumping station would become the headquarters of the Spirulina plant. The water-agitator out back would serve as a demonstration and test tank. The empty lands around it were a perfect place for large, outstretching algae growing pools. The algae would be pumped into the station, freeze-dried, packaged, and shipped via direct truck access to the highway.

The business case was staggering: a multi-million dollar enterprise could be established in a short time, employing dozens of people, with a return on investment under five years.

The Evaluation

The Spirulina plant achieved everything the project set out to do. It provided a solid economic resource, made the town visible in a unique way along the highway, created employment, resolved the saline groundwater issue, and used a completely renewable ecological resource that tied into the town's existing health brand. On paper, it was a textbook systemic solution: one intervention addressing multiple problems across multiple ELSI categories simultaneously.

Bosschaert presented the plan to the city council, fully convinced it would work.

The Rejection

Much to his surprise, town officials hardly took it seriously. This was 2001. "Sustainability" was a word rarely used among general audiences. Algae seemed an outlandishly crackpot idea. Nobody cared to check the numbers or even imagine this could become reality.

The reason for the rejection was not the plan. It was the process.

Bosschaert had developed the project without involving the stakeholders in the journey. He had done the analysis, found the solution, and presented it as a finished product. He assumed everyone would see the same potential he did. Instead, the townspeople could not imagine "weird algae" having a place in their community. They felt uninvested. To them it was nothing more than a crazy idea that dropped out of the sky.

"I failed at involving the people that I was doing it for," Bosschaert later wrote. "And because of that, they justifiably rejected the proposal. I did not build trust, understanding, and a shared solution. I learned a valuable lesson that day: without a collaborative process that involves the community and stakeholders, one is just building castles in the sky."

The Consolation

A decade later, the team worked with the town to redo the feasibility study, the time now ripe for more general acceptance. This revealed another pattern that has appeared repeatedly in systemic innovation work: it usually takes about a decade for an innovative solution to go from concept to implementation. The new feasibility study confirmed the project was still profitable and feasible. The town began looking for investors.

The early SiD approach worked beautifully, quickly, and efficiently, with results beyond imagination when designing a solution. But the failure to involve stakeholders resulted in a project that was never executed. Since then, stakeholder involvement and communication strategy have been central elements in the SiD system. The Merredin case is taught not as a failure of the method, but as the origin story of one of its most important principles: the process matters as much as the solution.