The pressures of industrialization impose increasingly unacceptable burdens on the environment. Resultant soil degradation, ozone depletion, toxic pollution and gradual global warming ultimately impede our economic development and the progress of civilization.

Both old sayings and new trends of environmental management show that prevention is always preferable to any cure. By redesigning products, streamlining industrial processes, and readjusting patterns of consumption, it is possible to promote and sustain economic development within the limits of environmental protection.

Material Concerns offers the first non-technical introduction to preventative environmental management. Using detailed case studies from across the industrial world, it unites the essential themes in the current debate surrounding development: new thinking on pollution prevention and ecological economics, the calculated limits to sustainability, and the real implications of the shift to a service economy.