"Designing for Zero Waste is a timely, topical and necessary publication. Materials and resources are being depleted at an accelerating speed and rising consumption trends across the globe have placed material efficiency, waste reduction and recycling at the centre of many government policy agendas, giving them an unprecedented urgency. While there has been a considerable literature addressing consumption and waste reduction from different disciplinary perspectives, the complex nature of the problem requires an increasing degree of interdisciplinarity. Resource recovery and the optimisation...

Today's most pressing challenges require behaviour change at many levels, from the city to the individual. This book focuses on the collective influences that can be seen to shape change.

Exploring the underlying dimensions of behaviour change in terms of consumption, media, social innovation and urban systems, the essays in this book are from many disciplines, including architecture, urban design, industrial design and engineering, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, waste management and public policy.

Aimed especially at designers and architects,...

The dominant understanding of reuse for sustainability is a technical one, which assumes reuse's benefits are limited to the new material, energy and emissions avoided by repurposing, but reuse is much more than that. Reuse and repurposing have always been part of human engagement with objects and spaces. Thus reuse and remaking are important topics in sustainable design, architecture, cultural studies, anthropology, and the sociology, economics and politics of consumption.

Given our current environmental crises and the unsustainable expansion of global consumerism in an age of...

The legacies of a century of fossil-fuel based development and overconsumption, of treating the environment as a waste sink for industry and agriculture, have left devastating impacts on the earth's air, water and land, and these are directly implicated in Climate Change. In response, a number of global institutions and nations, including the European Union and China, have committed themselves to the development of a 'circular economy'. This will require a transformation of today's 'linear economy' of 'make, use and dispose' as the market currently dictates, into a Circular Economy. The aim...