Recycle Everything

Book excerpt: Our current production-consumption system extracts raw materials from the earth, creates tangible products and after one or two uses, disposes of them in landfills. Recycle Everything; Why We Must, How We Can provides evidence of declining availability of raw materials from respected journals and organizations including the Department of Defense. The book explains how materials can be recycled in a system that retains and reuses them perpetually. In addition to parts suppliers, producers, distributors and consumers, there are new roles: collectors, disassemblers, used-parts brokers and materials processors. These new roles make it possible to recover, reprocess and reuse materials. Products are no longer sold and their materials lost; they are leased and tracked on their entire journey around the system from producer to consumer and back to producer. Finally, the book briefly describes the Institute for Material Sustainability and its role in helping industries transform themselves from linear systems dependent on extraction to systems that are self-sufficient and sustainable indefinitely into the future.