ABSTRACT
Whatever one thinks about the continual growth model of today's capitalist economies, there is no doubt that technological development and product manufacturing have both positive and negative effects. Alongside their ability to create wealth and provide a wide variety of benefits, there are enormous costs. Even though modern manufacturing facilities employ very sophisticated technologies, the fundamental approach to product design, production and distribution has remained essentially the same for a century or more. Resources are extracted from the earth, refined, formed into parts and assembled into products using mass-production processes; these products are then widely distributed, sold, used, discarded and replaced. This system, which has become increasingly automated over the years, is mainly unidirectional in terms of its flow of resources and energy. For most consumer products, post-use processing such as repair, refurbishment and redistribution, and retrieval of materials and components, are economically marginal and relatively rare; effective and widespread maintenance infrastructures only exist for the more expensive products, such as automobiles and white goods.
