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 Material
If we can develop waste systems that us to recycle nearly all unneeded objects and materials, and there is no reason why this is not technically possible, it would means that only a small percentage of the total required raw materials for manufacturing goods and constructing buildings need to be extracted from the ground.
Currently modern society is vastly inefficient, dumping perfectly good material back into the ground — creating ugly and environmentally hazardous wasteland dumps — while simultaneously creating further wasteland through quarrying, mining and deforestation. This can be reduced massively by engineering sophisticated recycling systems.
Automated recycling
Combining automated recycling with thoughtful engineering and design for disassembly should allow the recovery the majority of the material from goods and products when they come to the end of their useful life so it can be re-used to make the next generation of goods. This not only spares the land but reduces the energy required for material processing as it is already concentrated in useful form.
Automated recycling does not really exist yet in any significant form compared to what should be possible. Increasing amounts of product disassembly is occurring now, but it is mainly a manual task and is better left to machines if we can engineer them.
- Production of all parts with indelible barcodes or embedded RFID tags.
- Recycling plants that can disassemble any product whether it's components are tagged or not. Tags identifying components are likely to speed up the process if present.
Re-using
Also relevant in the big picture is making maximum use of an artifact by letting someone else have it after it has finished being useful to the current owner, rather than binning it. People often hoard, or dispose of, many items that would be perfectly useful to other people. More use of initiatives along the lines of eBay, charity shops and Freecycle could additionally improve mankind's resource efficiency further.
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