The Principles of Resource Efficiency - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 493

fertile soil, subsoil waters, fisheries and climate change, as an indication of deple-
tion. Quantifying the need for conservation is, in fact, a way of accounting the
amount of work needed to restore that which has been degraded. The more di -
cult an object is to restore, the stronger the need for its conservation. Accounting
replacement exergies is effectively the same thing as creating a debit account for
future generations. Each time one learns how to improve a given replacement, or
recycle it more e ciently, or even how to live with less, that person is putting the
brakes on Thanatia.
16.4 Summary of the chapter
This chapter has described the 12 principles that the authors consider to be the
basis of an e cient use of resources, including energy, water and materials. They
are expanded on by a series of corollaries, which are effectively concrete actions
serving as recommendations for industry, policymakers and civil society, to build
a new vision of economy and to ultimately achieve the goal sought in this topic:
the reduction and optimisation of the consumption of the Earth's limited mineral
endowment.
Such proposals include: maintaining quality and the necessary specifications of
the product, segregating polluting flows, using intelligent control systems, adapting
designs to Nature's rhythms, developing a multipurpose industry, promoting natural
integration (i.e. industrial symbiosis), coupling supply with demand, development
of new techniques for mass energy storage, intelligent preventive maintenance, de-
sign of flexible and resilient systems, assigning prices more closely related to natural
costs, dematerialising, transitioning society towards an appreciation of a product's
service rather than the product per se, reduce, reuse and recycling and finally pro-
moting the need to preserve and restore natural resources.