Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

XI C o n c l u s i o n
The environmental critique of modern production has
advanced on two fronts: sources and sinks. One has
highlighted industrialism’s devastation of certain natural
resources and ecosystems, the other the pervasive
pollution from its wastes. There have been attempts in
each case to provide remedies in isolation: to develop
sustainable forestry at one end, for example, or to install
pollution control equipment at the other. Both have had
an impact – but both find themselves holding back the
growing demands for new resources, and the growing
quantity of wastes, as a sea wall holds back the pressures
of a rising tide.
If the relentless growth of global material production is
to be outpaced, the problems of sources and of sinks
cannot be solved in isolation. They have to be seen as
p a rts of a wider chain of production and consumption
that must be re c o n f i g u red as a whole. The issue is one of
changes in productive systems – how products and
p rocesses are designed, how they operate and how
p roducts and materials, once used, re t u rn again to the
c i rcuit of production.
The major transformation now being demanded in
agriculture, where intensive farming is both depleting the
soil and leaving residues – whether in the area of
nitrogenous run-off or toxic middens – illustrates the
point, as do the shifts taking place in the energy sector
and in transport. In each case, the critique has broadened
from an identification of particular environmental
problems to a challenge to the economic architecture of
the productive system as a whole. Whether for food,
power or mobility the movement for reform is now being
framed in terms of how needs are being met – and how
they could be met differently in ways which would work
with the grain of social and natural ecosystems rather than
against them.
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