It is an elegant and compact way to express the concept that the industrial system must be conceived as an ecosystem. You know that the ecosystem doesn't run out of minerals, even though it uses minerals as nutrients for metabolic processes. That's possible because the ecosystem is a nearly completely closed cycle, that is what is "waste" for some organisms is "food" for others. Nothing ever can be 100% recycled, but the ecosystem comes close to that. The tiny fraction that is lost is slowly returned into the cycle by tectonic processes powered by the Earth's hot nucleus. The continents have been colonized by plants some 350 million years ago and plants have been "mining" minerals from the ground for all that time without ever running out of anything.
This is the way life works on this planet and if we want to survive we must learn from that. That is, we must learn that waste is food. Once you have that in mind, then you start understanding how wrong is almost everything we do with our waste. For instance, why do you want to incinerate your food? Why do you want to throw your food at the bottom of a pit and cover it with thousands of tons of dirt? You see, there are lots of things we must learn.
The other side of the peak: Long term tendencies of waste management (Cassandra's Legacy)
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