In this throw away civilization we create and live in, trashing everything is the most extensive and intensive human endeavor there is. We produce tons of waste. In the beginning of the production cycle in average only 5-30 % - just it is occasionally 60% - of the raw material is used; the rest is thrown away. Some serious people try to rise this percentage to 60% in average. Quite some materials aren't easily recyclable. On the other hand, there already is a factory that uses the thermal depolymerisation (TDP) process and feeds its machines with waste and sludge, and produces crude oil and gas out of it. Now, imagine that every city has such a plant and uses the fuel produced to for instance for warm water or to for heating in hospitals and other welfare facilities, at least instead of creating a landfill and thereby poisoning the downstream underground streams, soil, and making all those living around fall sick to cancer (like I have seen it a few times). Then the termolyzer technology looks promising for recovering back the precious metals and oil from e-waste. Could we come to a point then where all waste would be recycled and no new raw materials mined? There still would remain nuclear waste where they try to transmute it into radiologically innocuous in a few hundred years.
