The first principle of ecodesign is that ‚waste equals food’. Today a major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature’s ecosystems are cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. In nature, matter cycles, continually, and thus ecosystems generate no overall waste. Human businesses, by contrast, take natural resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste when they have used the products.
The principle ‚waste equals food’ means that all products and materials manufactured by industry, as well as the waste generated in the manufacturing processes, must eventually provide nourishment for something new. A sustainable business organization would be embedded in an ‚ecology of organizations’, in which the waste of any one organization would be the resource for another. In such a sustainable industrial system, the total outflow of each organization – its products and wastes – would be perceived and treated as resources cycling through the system.
...
As this new century unfolds, there are two developments that will have major impacts on the well-being and ways of life of humanity. Both have to do with networks, and both involve radically new technologies. One is the rise of global capitalism; the other is the creation of sustainable communities based on ecological literacy and the practice of ecodesign. Whereas global capitalism is concerned with electronic networks of financial and informational flows, ecodesign is concerned with ecological networks of energy and material flows. The goal of the global economy is to maximize the wealth and power of its elites; the goal of ecodesign to maximize the sustainablitity of the web of life.

These two scenarios – each involving complex networks and special advanced technologies – are currently on a collision course. We have seen that the current form of global capitalism is ecologically and socially unsustainable. The so-called ‘global market’ is really a network of machines programmed according to the fundamental principle that money-making should take precedence over human rights, democracy, environmental protection or any other value.
However human values can change; they are not natural laws. The same electronic networks of financial and informational flows could have other values built into them. The critical issue is not technology, but politics. The great challenge of the twenty-first century will be to change the value system underlying the global economy, so as to make it compatible with the demands of human dignity and ecological sustainability. …

out of ‘Hidden Connections, a Science for Sustainable Living’ by Fritjof Capra, Harper Collins Publishers 2002