The more I read, listen, and learn, the more I realize how unbelievably wasteful our current economy is.  The examples are plenty, and the statistics are staggering.  Consider this: in the normal course of business, over 1 million pounds of resources are extracted, used, and cast aside as waste per year for each American in the U.S. economy.  This does not count the weight of the water that’s also involved.  So again, over 20X the body weight of each American flows through the economy each day!  And the vast majority of these resources - once a part of our natural capital - are cast aside as waste.

Why is this? What’s happening here? First, we’ve already established that historically capitalism has not really accounted for the cost of natural capital.  So it was easy to waste, because costs are minimal.  Second, recycling has been a low priority, so the vast majority of products are made with “virgin” resources.  Third, wealth as we’ve defined it results from pushing these single-use resources through factories and disposing of them at an ever more rapid pace.  In the end, at the pinnacle of capitalism, we are generating waste streams that simply boggle the mind.

I don’t think any of us regret that the industrial revolution occurred - tons of good has come from it and from capitalism, even the old wasteful capitalism - but it’s clearly time to re-define progress.  It’s time to trim the fat. It’s time to expose the waste that is rampant in virtually all aspects of our economic lives (efficiency of gasoline engines, % of electricity wasted from the grid, excessive energy use in poorly designed buildings…the list is virtually endless) and profit from finding ways to reduce it. Successful companies in the 21st century will factor in the real cost of natural capital and innovate ways to make our limited resources more productive.