Resource Efficiency Quotes

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

I'm more convinced than when I accepted this job that we can create a viable Ford Motor Co. that makes cars and trucks that people really do prefer. And we can make them using minimum resources and minimum time and be competitive with our competition.

Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people's lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society.

There is little doubt that a significant part of any serious solution will require advances of technology, but that can only be part of the solution. Other major changes are necessary.

Waste of resources is a mortal sin at IKEA.

It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips? I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain... Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.

Get maximum effect from minimum effort.

A smaller and smaller area of land will be able to produce commodities of greater use or higher value

There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.

I clearly understood the concept of wise use before I ever heard the actual words, for my father wouldn't allow us to waste anything.

The self-commissioned architect is the obviously exclusive potential - for as at present used, or designed, the world's resources are serving only forty-four per cent of humanity.

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.

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years.

Whatever we do toward energy independence has to be done in the context of using less resources.

My vision for Visy Tumut is not only to keep our position as an example of world's sustainable manufacturing, but to build on it.

It is much easier to put existing resources to better use, than to develop resources where they do not exist.

The growth model China has relied on for the last 30 years - one predicated on low-cost exports to the rest of the world and investment in resource intensive heavy manufacturing - is unlikely to serve it well in the next 30 years.

In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously

I have often said China is not lacking in material resources. The question is whether we can make full and good use of them.

Sustainable development: Meeting present needs without compromising the stock of natural resources remaining for future generations. In terms of buildings, it implies resource efficiency, minimum energy use, flexibility and long life

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

I like to bring people together so we don't waste opportunities and resources and keep doing the wrong things when we know better. Corporate America makes great things and things that can hurt us. They have to be part of the solutions. There's nothing to say you don't make a profit by doing good.

Plastics, as a material, are very nasty, but as an alternative to, let's say, a brick, which seems really natural, they start to look pretty good. They're very low energy to produce, very lightweight to transport and construct. That's why they're so popular.