[Bromius]

There are a lot of changes that could be made to reduce our energy use. I think the paradigm for the future will be finding ways to organize our industrial processes so that the wastes from one will provide an input for the next. In essence this would be creating a synthetic ecosystem. Lately I've been dumbfounded by the amount of stuff I throw away. With some will and ingenuity I think it would be possible to arrive at a day when you put only two recyling bins on the curb. One would be synthetic recyclables like plastic, glass, metal etc and the other would be organic, such as food scraps, pet litter, paper, old clothing etc that could be used to make either methane or ethanol with the by-product being used as a semi-organic soil amendment, which in turn could help us produce more corn or whatever for ethanol or remediate soil erosion. This would take some rethinking of what we produce, but it could be done.