TOWARD SUSTAINABLE MATERIALS USE

Abstract

IF WE PAY CLOSER ATTENTION TO THE materials we produce, we will need to pay less attention to the impacts of those materials once released into the environment where people become exposed to them, suggests Kenneth Geiser in Matter: Toward a Sustainable Materials Policy Instead of negotiating complex regulatory systems and continually inventing control technologies, we need to design less toxic materials and processes that use materials without wastefully dissipating them. Geiser is director of the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Institute, a multidisciplinary research, education, and policy center at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and served as a member of the core advisory group for the United Nations Environment Program's Cleaner Production Program. Geiser's extensive text could easily stand as two separate books. The first part of the book provides a history of materials development and use in the U.S. over the past 200 years, with a focus on chemicals and metals. Geiser review...