Cradle-to-Cradle..

My house is full of stuff because i'm a bit of a hoarder.
Throwing things out is hard for me, & the sight of things
building up in land-fills is not something i can ignore.
A little spare money means a trip to the recovery store at the local landfill site.

Our primate ancestors had no problem with throwing stuff away - it was biodegradable & living mostly in trees meant not having to live with their own rubbish.
We haven't quite adjusted yet - if our ancestors had been feline, would we insist on burying our effluent, i wonder?

Industry & farming have the same problem, on a larger & more destructive scale. Planned obsolescence took no account of what to do with the newly obsolete because it didn't directly cost manufacturers anything, & anyway that's what second-hand dealers of all sorts were there for..
At the end of the chain was the tip (aka dump, landfill, whatever).

Cradle-to-grave..

Now we have to start thinking about ways out of this problem.

So Cradle-to-Cradle makes interesting reading. And it's actually a commercially viable concept according to the two people who formed this company.

And there are others..
"let's start designing things with the idea that they will never become waste but will always be reused in some form or another"

As a kid i lived next door to an old bloke who had a work-shop with a big 3-phase electric motor mounted under the rafters - it drove his grinder & wire-brush buffer & his 4-speed drill-press; all done with belt-drives! In one corner was a big German lathe salvaged from World War 1 or 2, i never worked out which, & he had the usual oxy-acetylene & arc-welding gear (& - quite rightly! - he went really went crook at us kids if we ever looked at the welding process, even for a second!).

And he never seemed to throw anything away!
Someone would come in looking for an odd-sized bolt or something, & he'd have it! Somewhere. In one of a whole lot of tins full of kerosene to stop them rusting..

Composting is a form of recycling that i became most familiar with. I hated digging the garden, it was exhausting, & i hated weeding even more. But the thing i loathed most was "mowing the lawn". Yes, it's supposed to be good stuff for kids to play on, & we did, but the baulky, stiff little push-mower was definitely not my friend. At all. Composting was the only thing i was any good at, & i enjoyed experimenting with heaps & bins of various sizes, collecting stuff to feed them, & keeping an eye on them.

We weren't made of money, so we couldn't afford waste. The habit's stuck.