Zero waste manufactoring is something we need to consider as we try to transform agriculture systems and our broader societies into sustainable systems. This is the idea of designing groups of manufacturing processes so that all the waste outputs from each process are used by the other processes. This is how biological systems have evolved. Anything released by the organisms in an ecological system is an opportunity and resource that other organisms in the system have evolved (over many centuries) to use.

In zero waste systems the various components of each process are engineered to use materials from other processes and to produce materials (other than finished products) that can be used by other processes. If a process produces a waste product that is too difficult or expensive to reuse then that process needs to be redesigned to modify or eliminate that waste product (e.g. heavy metals and persistent toxins in urban sewage streams greatly increase the cost and difficulty of reusing sewage sludge). Also finished products should be designed for disassembly and reuse when their usable life cycle is ended.

Biological systems make major changes pretty slowly, over many 1000s of years, so the various organisms can change to make use of all the materials and energy being cycled in a system. We humans have the capacity to design and build or move new systems and processes so quickly (months and years) that other biological organisms can not keep up with us. Therefore we need to incorporate recycling into our systems as we design them. Of course we also need to recognize that this is not a change that can be made suddenly, millions of lives are dependent on existing processes that must be maintained during a process of gradual change. Sudden catastrophic changes in human social structures may lead to severe ecological damage as millions of humans struggle to survive.

Zero waste manufactoring requires close links between farming systems and other manufactoring systems as farms are the main potential user of many mineral and organic outputs from manufactoring processes. Urban sewage sludge is only one obvious example - large quantities of organic material and mineral nutrients that have great value as soil conditioners and fertilizer if they are not contaminated with persistent toxins, a costly environmental headache if they can not be used by agriculture.

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