Having literally grown up with a large-scale compost operation serving as my backyard, I have had a lifetime fascination with all things waste and the simple, elegant arithmetic of nature that transposes the equation 1+1=-2 to 1+1=2. The magic of a value-enriched future is no longer our choice but our imperative. Over the years, I have been drawn to the work of my friends John and Nancy Todd, who brought beauty and function into the mix of what used to be called just sewage treatment. And, I have had to wean myself from the assumption that tomatoes naturally grow to be the size of grapefruits and taste unbelievably delicious, as this was my reality from the vantage point of harvesting what I assumed tomatoes were out of my family’s backyard compost piles. But also I have been reminded countless times that what is right is not always supported in the policy-constricted landscape in which we operate. We know that politics and information must flow together.

There are numerous other examples to cite: Terra Preta (meaning dark soil in Portuguese) is a centuries-old process developed by indigenous people in Brazil’s Amazon basin, creating a kind of biochar waste-material from cleared forest trees, which enriches the soil more than 800% when mixed with nutrient-rich wastes that attach to this carbon based armature, establishing unheard of carbon sinks that help prevent global warming. No less than ten universities worldwide are exploring how this process can aid in the worldwide efforts to curb climate change, increase food production and act in between as a source of renewable energy within a framework of industrial ecology.

Or the feature could have focused on a series of new products such as what Barbara and Tom Johnson of the Johnson Design Studio did years ago in Seattle through their International Design Resource awards (1996-8), establishing a global benchmark competition and model for a new generation of product design inspired by “design with memory.”

Instead, we (ARCADE’s Editor Kelly Walker and Pliny Fisk III) decided to bring together examples that directly and immediately affect planning and design. These projects describe a possible stitching together of life cycles for how resources could be “urban mined” and manufactured sensibly based on Design for Manufacturing (DfM) and Design for Disassembly (DfD) protocols. Using these models, we could substantively impact the 33% of the waste stream now associated with building construction, demolition and renovation. Then I made believe that if our society really had its shit together, we would not only look at where the most well-known product/by-product example of integrated industry was happening (see “Wasteland”), we would plan our whole urban/regional infrastructure and economy around this, even our entire country, in one gigantic industrial ecology effort (the latter expressed in “Really Going For It!”).

Perhaps the astounding part about all this is that we are on our way to what I call “resource balancing our economy.” Taking into consideration the combined efforts of the Urban Ores of the Berkeleys, the Wastelands of the Kalundorgs, the Life Cycle Building Challenges proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), what we are talking about from the stand point of the total economy is mind boggling—it is as though human settlement could actually be catching up to that balance of producers and consumers so much a part of nature’s economy—a place where every stable-state economic activist wants to be—a Herman Daly Input/Output fantasy—where there is an overall economy that actually reflects directly the inherent value of representing the real value of good work—for it seems that: “according to the EPA, recycling’s combined income in 2004 was about the same size as the US auto industry, or about $226 billion.” And recycling is about five-times the size of the waste industry in gross receipts. This is not yet even putting into the equation those three examples listed above, nothing about the building sector nor the industrial ecology sector—just the “urban ore” sector, as Dan Knapp has so aptly coined.

I dedicate this issue to my Dad, Pliny Fisk II , for his unadulterated boldness and foresight to transform the conceptualization and utilization of waste across American cities. By the time the 1950s had come about, he had 52 patents for high-rate composting and plans for 500-tons-per-day modular units to be placed across the country via our backyard.