[GreenYes] Dr. Paul Connett on Zero Waste

["Bill Sheehan" <bill_sheehan@mindspring.com>]

>From a talk given by Dr. Paul Connett at the launching
of Target Zero Canada - Toronto, Canada, November
21, 2000.  On a video soon to be available from
GRRN and TZC.

"We are looking at the transition of the three R’s of
waste management to the three E’s of resource
management.  We all know what the three R’s are –
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  The three E’s are
Efficiency, Economics, and Ethics.

Efficiency -- waste is the visible face of inefficiency.
Economics says that if you make less waste you’re
more efficient, and if you’re more efficient you save
money, you save materials, you save energy and of
course you create jobs. You need jobs because you
need better designers and better organizers. Waste
is not a high tech problem it is a low-tech problem.  It’s
not magic machines; it is better design, better
organization, better education, both at the municipality
level and the industrial level.

And finally the Ethics, basically what we’re seeing
here is an attempt to harmonize business interests
with community interests, whether we view those community interests as local
or global, it is a
harmonization.  Not only do people need to belong to
a community, but industries, companies, and
corporations need to belong. They need to take roots
in the ecology of commerce and that is the ethics
issue."