Waste Not, Want Not  

Wired has an interesting article up about companies moving to a "zero waste" regime for their factories. This isn't for altuistic reasons of course - they are realising that waste is a symptom of inefficiencies in the production process, and, even worse, disposing of it costs money and those costs are rising.

Making our industrial processes as efficient as possible is a wonderful aim of course, though I sometimes wonder if Jevon's paradox means this is just a way of ensuring extractionism consumes every last resource on the planet before it finally collapses. Still - hopefully companies will catch onto the idea of sustainability after they've mastered the "zero waste" concept.

Each week, hundreds of new cars1 roll out of the Subaru factory in Lafayette, Indiana. What doesn't come out of the plant is garbage. When the garbage truck rolls up to the curb in front of your house each week, it hauls away more trash than is generated by the manufacturing processes at the factory.

The factory is the first auto assembly plant in North America to become completely waste-free: Last year, 100 percent of the waste steel, plastic and other materials coming out of the plant were reused or recycled. Paint sludge that used to be thrown away, for example, is now dried to a powder and shipped to a plastics manufacturer, ending up eventually as parking lot bumpers and guardrails. What can't be reused -- about 3 percent of the plant's trash -- is shipped off to Indianapolis and incinerated to generate electricity.