Material/Less material

Recycling is likely to become far more widespread than it is now, further reducing the burden of having to process new material to create goods and infrastructure. Product design and engineering will become increasingly sympathetic to the recycling process which is becoming increasingly automated. It is possible that recycling could become so efficient, that almost no industrial feedstock need come from the ground.

Another possibility is that carbon could be harvested directly from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon and carbon-based compounds can have many useful properties such as very high strength-to-weight ratios and electrical conductance. Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere also helps mitigate the effects of global warming, however staggeringly vast quantities would have to be removed to have any significant effect on climate change. However trees do exactly this, extracting billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere to create wood.

Landfill also may become a useful source of already concentrated desirable material - plastics, metals etc.