Monograph analysing present waste trends and future supply and demand of natural resources, (raw materials, energy sources and food security) in a world of faced with rapid population growth - makes recommendations for economic policies allowing for technology and research and development, to satisfy basic needs, while providing for resources conservation and protection of the climate. Diagrams, graphs and statistical tables.

Beyond the Age of Waste: A Report to the Club of Rome, Second Edition discusses the results of the study conducted by the Club of Rome, which tackles the issues of the depletion of resources and its implication for the world in general. The opening chapter is an introduction that covers the history and cites several events relevant in tackling the issues that this book covers. Chapter 2 covers energy, including demands, sources, and implication of energy problems. The third chapter is about materials, encompassing the supply, life cycle, and technology. Chapter 4 discusses issues about food, which includes production, agricultural resources, and commodities. Chapter 5 covers climate, while chapter 6 discusses some global considerations. The last chapter deals with science, technology, and institutional implications. This book will be of great interest to readers who are concerned with the possibility of resource crisis.

Monograph analysing present waste trends and future supply and demand of natural resources, (raw materials, energy sources and food security) in a world of faced with rapid population growth - makes recommendations for economic policies allowing for technology and research and development, to satisfy basic needs, while providing for resources conservation and protection of the climate. Diagrams, graphs and statistical tables.

Originally published: New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients. High Tech Trash is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics arrive daily. There, they are "recycled"-picked apart by hand, exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics. As Grossman notes, "This is a story in which we all play a part, whether we know it or not. If you sit at a desk in an office, talk to friends on your cell phone, watch television, listen to music on headphones, are a child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story." The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If Silent Spring brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, High Tech Trash could do the same for a new generation of technology's products.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it's also waste-or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse: nuclear waste, climate debris, pop-culture rubbish, digital detritus, and more. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.