Closed Loop Quotes

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.

Philips is committed to the circular economy and is applying its principles throughout the organization. We are redesigning our products and looking at ways to capture their residual value.

Waste equals food, whether it's food for the earth, or for a closed industrial cycle. We manufacture products that go from cradle to grave. We want to manufacture them from cradle to cradle.

I take a lot of satisfaction in trying to make my land as self-contained as possible, its own little mini environment. Minimal outputs; minimal inputs.

The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary sunlight of our star.

The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Waste does not exist in nature because ecosystems reuse everything that grows in a never-ending cycle of efficiency and purpose.

We've teamed up with some Japanese companies to, basically by 2010, make all our clothing out of recycled and recyclable fibers. And we're going to accept ownership of our products from birth to birth. So if you buy a jacket from us, or a shirt ,or a pair of pants, when you're done with it, you can give it back to us and we'll make more shirts and pants out of it.

If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.