If someone were to present the Industrial Revolution as a retroactive design assignment, it might sound like this:
Design a system of production that
*puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
* measures prosperity by activity, not legacy
* requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
* produces materials so dangerous that they will require constant vigilance from future generations
* results in gigantic amounts of waste
* puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
* erodes the diversity of biological species and cultural practices
Eco-efficiency instead
*releases fewer pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
*measures prosperity by less activity
*meets or exceeds the stipulations of thousands of complex regulations that aim to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
*produces fewer dangerous materials that will require constant vigilance from future generations
*results in smaller amounts of waste
*puts fewer valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
*standardizes and homogenizes biological species and cultural practices
Plainly put, eco-efficiency aspires to make the old, destructive system less so. But its goals, however admirable, are fatally limited.
Reduction, reuse, and recycling slow down the rates of contamination and depletion but do not stop these processes. Much recycling, for instance, is what we call "downcycling," because it reduces the quality of a material over time. When plastic other than that found in such products as soda and water bottles is recycled, it is often mixed with different plastics to produce a hybrid of lower quality, which is then molded into something amorphous and cheap, such as park benches or speed bumps. The original high-quality material is not retrieved, and it eventually ends up in landfills or incinerators.
The well-intended, creative use of recycled materials for new products can be misguided. For example, people may feel that they are making an ecologically sound choice by buying and wearing clothing made of fibers from recycled plastic bottles. But the fibers from plastic bottles were not specifically designed to be next to human skin. Blindly adopting superficial "environmental" approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better than doing nothing.
Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they were designed for—a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled"—a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.