The Ecology Of Commerce, Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken - The Ecology Of Commerce; Dropping a plastic box into the recycling, you're reminded that the physical object you're holding is just the tip of a movement of energy and raw inputs which served a purpose and now, maybe, if you're very lucky, is going to get recycled for another go around the production pipeline. Multiply that by the millions of people throwing away, and consuming resources around you, a proportion of them possibly throwing and thinking similar thoughts about similar rubbish/recycling and it very quickly starts to feel unsustainable, as an unresolvable mountain of waste is produced by just the people dropping that box into their bin.

This book then looks at that interface between energy and resource inputs, and the environment which is going to need to absorb waste from our production processes, and states quite plainly that the system which produced those boxes, and allows for us to just chuck things is both unsustainable and harmful for Starship Earth. Therein lies another path, which it pointed at by the environment around us. We should aim to better utilise our resources in cycles, to ensure that we're dumping the minimum back into the environment, and trying to always create virtuous cycles where there is no waste, just inputs to another system somewhere else, and each input-output-input cycle creates money/enterprise.

We're then aiming for all our energy inputs to come from renewable sources, and for the inputs of any system to be the output of another system, just like in the planet around us. Without this, those boxes will scale to mountains in ten, one hundred or a thousand years. A small number scaled will kill a finite system if applied on an infinite timeline.

From when this was first written, we're now at the point that we're seeing the immediate effects of climate change caused in part by the massive amount of waste (gases as well as boxes) we're generating... we'd best get on with engineering and discovering those virtuous cycles.