Recycling, Thermodynamics, and Environmental Thrift
Author(s)
Berry, R. Stephen
Abstract
As environmental considerations become more important in policy decisions and planning, a compelling need has emerged for reliable and robust indices of environmental use. This is particularly true when choosing between alternative policies, which requires the identification of variables that can be quantified, that are general enough to allow comparison between quite different sorts of processes, that provide key measures or indices, and that yield true measures of the amount of use of the environment. Towards this end, the quantities derived from thermodynamics are the most obvious and natural, and they meet all of these criteria.
