End-of-life no more. The application of nanotechnology to industrial ecology

Industrial Ecology (IE) is an interdisciplinary field of study that uses system approaches to focus upon the relationship of industrialism to organisms and their environment. IE promotes changes from a wasteful economy, to a closed looped system of production and consumption. Through this mechanism, industrial, governmental and consumer waste is reused, recycled, and remanufactured to the limits of knowledge and technology. Nanotechnology is technology operating at the atomic level. An application of this technology is the manufacture of inert and bio-objects. Similar to nature, bio-engineered “software” instructions will be the blueprint for the assembly and operation of products at, or from the atomic level. The development of this technology presents the possibility of the application to dis-assemble existing and future waste (inert and bio) to the molecular level, and then re-assemble it into new resources and products. This cyclical approach if designed into the system, would show the raw materials used in objects to never reach end-of-life