Closing the Loop
Click image of the view of Earth from Apollo 8 over Rama’s interior to see a list of O’Neill cylinders and other space habitats.
The Story of Stuff, an entertaining video presentation, illustrates among many other concepts, the limitations of recycling. For every barrel you recycle, 70 barrels of waste were required in manufacturing the item. And just 1% of the things people buy are kept six months later, the rest is trash. (Makes my iPod seem not quite as bad as Greenpeace makes out).
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”–Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Speaking of cradles, the book Cradle To Cradle: Remaking The Way We Make Things calls for true recycling as might be needed offworld in a self-contained habitat, according to Amazon:
In Cradle to Cradle, the authors present a manifesto calling for a new industrial revolution, one that would render both traditional manufacturing and traditional environmentalism obsolete. Recycling, for instance, is actually “downcycling,” creating hybrids of biological and technical “nutrients” which are then unrecoverable and unusable. The authors, an architect and a chemist, want to eliminate the concept of waste altogether, while preserving commerce and allowing for human nature.
